The Marie Kondo Book Challenge

Thesis: Americans have too many possessions, and we have a lot to learn from philosophies of letting go of unnecessary possessions, emotions and beliefs and living with utilitarian modesty and psycho-spiritual cleanliness.  Marie Kondo, the Japanese home management sensation, suggested that to achieve her concept of clean domestic living, one should keep no more than 30 books.  Most book lovers, at least in the West, have far more than 30 books, so paring their collections down to just 30 would be a painful ordeal.  However, these books will continue to exist with others even if you don’t own them, and there is always room for cutting away chaff in one’s personal life so you can go into the future unencumbered.

Challenge: list 30 books that you consider essential enough to save from a library-wide purge.  For each book talk about why it’s essential for you.  My personal guidelines:

1. Only choose books you own.

2. Only choose books you have read at least once.

3. No reference books (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) or instruction books (cookbooks, etc.).

4. No books that you wrote or co-wrote (those you have automatically and aren’t counted towards the 30-book total).

It may help to think of it not as a purge of books you don’t need but rather a celebration of books that you would be happy with keeping above others in perpetuity.  Imagine you materialize in a home where you are to spend the remainder of your life, and you have 30 books already there.  The list is more about what you are grateful to have, what is meaningful and fulfilling for you, rather than all the books you’d need to discard to get to these 30.

Another thing to remember is that nobody will judge you for changing your mind about the list down the road.  Everyone changes over time, and you may find yourself regretting picks for your list, or wishing others were there.  Any list of this nature is a snapshot of the author’s mind when it was composed, and speaking from personal experience, any regret you may have in the future can easily be replaced with curiosity of the nature of how minds grow and change.

My list as of April 2021, in alphabetical order by author:

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe (1962)

While on holiday, an amateur entomologist takes a bus to a remote area of Japan overrun by sand dunes in order to study rare beetles.  He misses the last bus home, but a villager offers to put him up for the night in a local home.  The house is at the bottom of a sand pit, occupied by a mysterious woman, and after a congenial night spent with her the protagonist discovers that the rope ladder he got down on is gone.  He discovers that he was lured into a trap, meant to give the widow a replacement husband and have another body for a crooked local economic system.  Ingeniously constructed and at times a quite tense thriller, Abe’s best-known novel is perhaps the best existentialist fiction I’ve ever seen.  The entomologist’s struggle to deal with the situation he’s been dropped in to, and how to reconcile the life he lost with whatever new life he can scrounge up in the pit, hits right at the core of the pain of being human, and how we adapt and make due with what we have, even if our way to do so is ludicrous.

Barlowe’s Inferno by Wayne Barlowe (1998)

Wayne Barlowe is one of the most famous and respected cover illustrators in science fiction, making a huge splash at age 20 when he published Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, an art book of near-photorealistic paintings of creatures from classic and contemporary sci-fi.  Tons of cover work and other books followed, including a Guide to Fantasy, and in 1998 he put out my favorite work of his, Barlowe’s Inferno, exploring his own spin on Hell.  Taking inspiration not just from Christian myth and the work of Dante, Barlowe treats Hell as a canvas to explore striking fantasy and metaphysics concepts, all of it uniquely designed and painted with a skill and vigor I challenge any artist, living or dead, to match.  I can’t begin to describe how jaw-dropping these paintings are, and how much I respect his world-building – so much so that the book was a big influence on my own fictional work in progress set in a possible afterlife.

The Feverhead by Wolfgang Bauer (1967)

I found this short novel by the Austrian playwright Wolfgang Bauer for $1 at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, and it’s still one of the funniest and most ingenious experimental novels I’ve ever seen.  Structured as a series of letters between two friends that are perpetually crossed in the mail, beginning as an effort to uncover a possible murder mystery at a ski resort but spiraling out of control, and reality, with strange details ballooning into surrealism until the book’s world flares and collapses like a dying star.  It’s a hard book to talk about because so much of its effect is in the surprise of how the nature of what is really happening reveals itself, but the book’s brevity, quirky preoccupations and sheer hilarity make it impossible to put down.  I can’t think of another novel that made me laugh out loud like this one, and it’s all so cleverly constructed that you want to immediately read it again once you’ve finished it.  A brilliant, streaking meteor of a novel, and sadly quite rare – the specialist British firm Atlas Press issued the only English translation in the 1990’s, and it has remained out of print and quite scarce since.  I’m choosing it because it’s a delightful puzzle and will make me laugh for years to come.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1971)

There have been dozens, hundreds of attempts to remix fairytales for the postmodern age, and while some remixes are fun and probing, others are the height of tedium, or are too cynical for their own good.  The Last Unicorn manages the impossible, sampling from classic fairy tales in a knowing, metafictional way while crafting a story so tender and moving you forget about postmodernism and let it flow into you like water.  Most of you already know of the last Unicorn and her journey to find more of her kind, helped by a cut-rate wizard and facing off against a villain as stately and monolithic as he is tenuous and human.  Every funny moment is matched with a heartfelt one, each scary scene offset by wonder in the next, and there are passages so moving that I was nearly in tears.  Beagle’s prose and handling of his soft-edged fantasy world are so deft that reading the book is, to borrow a phrase from the climax, like “a knife falling through clouds”, making you wonder why other books can’t manage themselves as easily.  Beautiful and touching from start to finish.

The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Book of Tiny Poems by Robert Bly, ed. (1971)

Poetry anthologies are usually seen as disposable, and for someone like me who prefers to have the original full collections of the poets these books are rarely compelling.  When they have a specific point, though, magic can happen, and there are few anthologies of any sort more magical than The Sea and the Honeycomb, Robert Bly’s jewel box of tiny poems from across the centuries.  Bly’s preface captures the beauty and importance of very short poems, remarking that, if these poems are like a cliff, readers who can understand them will fly from the cliff’s edge like birds, and those who don’t will fall and be killed instantly by the rocks below.  Bly’s selections range from haiku to modern American gems to 9^th-century Spanish Moors and many things in between, and every poem is a gem, not wasting a single word.  My taste in poetry aims towards the small, valuing those artists who can make single gestures with profound effect, and the perfection of the poems chosen here bolsters my belief in the power of miniature art.  It’s important, to paraphrase Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, to use the one right tool, and the poets here used theirs to make pure diamonds.

Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover (1982)

Robert Coover is one of the best-remembered of the 1960s’s slew of postmodernist experimental authors, and Spanking the Maid is the best work of his I’ve read so far.  Taking place (possibly) in a single room, the novella depicts a sort of Groundhog Day scenario of a maid cleaning her master’s bedroom, and Coover takes this simple idea and explores a striking array of psychological and sexual concepts, eventually bringing the scenario into the realm of metafiction and possibly the supernatural.  I dare not spoil anything, not just because of the book’s brevity but also because it’s all bitingly funny and strange, and at times not only quite dark but seriously thought-provoking about the psychological bedrock of the nature of power, the relationship between men and women, and even the sources of religious belief.  Much like The Feverhead, it’s a puzzle-box meant to induce laughter and alarm, amazingly ambitious for its size, an easy recommendation for someone looking for an evening’s bewilderment.

Vignettes: A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment by Hubert Crackanthorpe (1896)

Hubert Crackanthorpe was a realist author of stories and novellas at the end of the 19^th century who drowned in the Seine at age 26 in mysterious circumstances.  Almost totally forgotten today, he would have remained unknown to me if I was not introduced to his book Vignettes by a video by the author and book collector Mark Valentine.  The vignettes are travel sketches of Crackanthorpe’s experiences in France, and the language is so rich it’s ridiculous.  The book is subtitled “A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment”, and the episodes described are less concrete memoir and more scenes from dream and memory, gliding through their curious incidents like a leaf on a lazy river.  Crackanthorpe’s command of descriptive language was supreme, but he pared down the entries in this slim book so deftly that you couldn’t imagine using any other words even if you might not personally have chosen the ones he did.  I was floored by the book’s charm and sheer beauty, and the 1896 1^st edition I have is a tiny, perfect object, one of my most treasured books.  While this has never been reprinted and is quite rare, you can read it as a free PDF from the Internet Archive.

Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood by Stanley Crawford (1978)

Riffing on Victorian-era household behavior guides, Stanley Crawford’s Some Instructions… reads as the deranged rules and regulations of a megalomaniacal patriarch.  Beginning with wifely duties, then addressing his children and eventually his death, the concerns of the unnamed father and husband in this family are as outrageous as they are conceited, treating home and family as a canvas upon which to paint a masterpiece of controlling self-importance.  His tips and requests contain such howlers as asking his daughter to make sure any suitor’s breath is not a “rank emanation”, to instructions on the building of a huge seed pod for his body to be encased in for burial, and the whole book had me on the floor with laughter.  It’s a brilliant satire, reminding us that just because you can live magnificently, that doesn’t mean you’ll know what that should entail, or be able to do it without detriment to others.

The City Curious by Jean de Bosschère (1920)

Jean de Bosschère was a stunning Belgian illustrator, providing incredible work during the 1910’s and ‘20’s for translations of ancient texts, collections of folk tales and his own writings that frequently outpaced the contents of the books in sheer creativity.  His own books ranged from symbolist parables to a book on raising peacocks, but his crown jewels may be The City Curious and Weird Islands, a pair of illustrated children’s books he wrote and drew in the early 1920’s while living in England.  These are wildly surreal, exuberant fantasies of the Baum-esque fin-de-siècle style, eschewing logic and drama in favor of pure invention and fun, and every two page spread has some sort of illustration, all of them jaw-dropping.  Weird Islands is utterly wonderful but can’t compare to The City Curious, which compliments its parade of B&W illustrations with 8 full-color insert pages, as well as going whole hog on a complicated plot involving a candy world, a villain made of cardboard, and a dizzying array of strange beings and incidents.  If you’re interested in early fantasy literature of this era you must seek this book out, it’s unbelievable.  The pair are among my most prized possessions, and as you might guess the scarce 1^st editions were pretty expensive to acquire, but fear not – you can read The City Curious on the Internet Archive, as scanners and uploaders are good people who want to preserve books no matter how popular they are.

Une semaine de bonté by Max Ernst (1934)

One of the most productive, wide-ranging and important surrealist painters, Max Ernst was not a writer.  However, he did release a “novel” in a series of pamphlets, Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Happiness), though it had no real linguistic content.  Structured for each day of the week, where the day is given a thematic element (such as mud for Sunday and blackness for Thursday), the “days” are sets of surrealist collages made of cutouts from Victorian-era novels, catalogs and magazines.  The resulting pictures are vivid nightmares, where men with animal heads attack people, naked women lounge across whole streets and waters flood cities.  Confining itself to city streets, Ernst’s dream world is both unified and unrelenting, giving each day a distinct set of symbols to explore with no explanation as to meaning except for what the reader, or viewer, extrapolates.  Whether his “novel” has a narrative is left for us to decide, and the work as a whole is one of the best surrealist projects I’ve ever seen.

Waking by Eva Figes (1981)

This short novel depicts the life of an ordinary woman through a series of mornings; she wakes up in the early hours, with the house to herself, and reflects on her life.  This simple device takes us through several morning spread across her whole existence.  Figes’s descriptive language and insight into female, and human, character is incredible, and each morning’s reflection is a spare-yet-lush masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness prose.  We all have these moments, state-of-the-union addresses to ourselves that attempt to make sense of our place in the world and everything we’ve accomplished, and showing a life in terms of these amplifies their beauty and importance while also capturing the tragedy of a life lived on the interior, achieving little more than a meager solace.

The Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955)

This book is a bit of a cheat, as I haven’t actually finished it, just the first half – I hope you’ll forgive me, as it’s 900 densely-packed pages, but from what I’ve read it may be one of the greatest novels ever written.  William Gaddis set out to write a fairly modest book, a modern spin on the Faust legend, and ended up with a searing, encyclopedic commentary on the mid-century American psyche as seen through a man who becomes an art forger for a mysterious, Luciferian patron.  The erudition and cultural history that is explored in the book is staggering, prompting one researcher to build a whole website to annotate all of Gaddis’s references.  Even reading without the annotated guide one can see that the novel, a debut if you can believe it, is a masterpiece, with the 60+-page first chapter excisable as a perfect novella.  I can’t make a full review until I finish it, and I plan on doing a full read one day – and if I only have 30 books to read, I’ll have time to conquer Gaddis’s summit.

All the Little Animals by Walker Hamilton (1968)

All the Little Animals is told through the eyes of a young man suffering an intellectual disability he incurred as a child when he was struck by a car.  Left in the care of the Fat Man, a cold, controlling brute, the protagonist runs away from his guardian one day, only to stumble upon a mysterious old man living in the Cornish woods.  The elder man retrieves dead animals from the roads and gives them spiritual burials, and the two outcasts form an unusual friendship, with the old man enlisting the younger to help in acts of disruption against humans and ultimately culminating in a battle with the Fat Man.  A haunting fable of good and evil, perception and reality, the short novel was one of only two books Walker Hamilton completed before his untimely death, and it has resonated with me for years as a portrait of a kind soul attempting to navigate a world far beyond his comprehension and somehow coming out sane and whole.

Ice by Anna Kavan (1967)

The final novel of the mysterious British author Anna Kavan (real name Helen Emily Woods), Ice is the best melding of apocalypse and allegory I’ve seen in fiction.  In a world that is slowly being overtaken by colossal wall of ice, a man pursues a woman.  That is all the big plot there is, but everything is in the details.  The main characters are unnamed throughout the book, and the man’s stripped-down quest is as inevitable as the unstoppable ice wall all of humanity is trying to escape.  Locales and cultural details are purposefully vague, placing the narrative in the realm of allegory, and scenes of cinematic intensity resonate like nightmares.  I’m fascinated stories that use surrealism and dream-language to tap into the primordial nature of the human condition, and as cryptic and grim as the story is the reader can’t shake the feeling that Kavan intuited the pure essence of the absurdity of humanity’s struggle to control its world.  Kavan’s prose is as expert as it comes, sharpening away the blunt edges of sentiment and pomp to streamline her vision, plunging straight into the reader’s heart.

Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle (1975)

William Kotzwinkle’s writing spans a huge range of genres and subjects, and for this, perhaps his most powerful book, he chose an unimaginable topic – stillbirth.  A young couple have their baby son delivered, only for him to be born dead, and the story proceeds from there, through stages of grief, the hideous details of the post-death process, and the couple’s attempt to reconcile their dreams for what their son’s future could have been with the cold reality of his non-existence.  Kotzwinkle’s command of small moments and emotional turmoil grips the reader like a vice, not letting go even in the face of gut-wrenching horrors.  Even if you wish you’d never witnessed the tragedy of it all, the experience is cathartic, perhaps even necessary, and you emerge with the couple into a new day, your heart torn out but still beating.

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)

A Voyage to Arcturus is one of the most powerful and strange novels I’ve ever seen, an incredible otherworld vision combining fantasy, science fiction and philosophy.  After witnessing an arresting astral projection incident at a party, a man goes on a crystal ship to Tormance, a fictional planet circling Arcturus, and undergoes a journey through the outer limits of morality, identity and existence itself.  David Lindsay’s melding of world-building and metaphor is incredibly compelling, and the ideas he presents are head-spinning in their intellectual breadth and ability to inspire and unsettle.  I can’t think of another book that had ideas so bizarre, and not all of them agreeable, but gripped me so strongly and kept me reading into unknown waters like this one.  It’s a book that I would choose perhaps above all others to have a book club read, knowing full well how controversial it would be with different readers, but it deserves to be read and talked about – a lightning bolt, never to be repeated.

Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay (1923)

My favorite family epic, Told by an Idiot follows the cosmopolitan Garden family from England’s late-Victorian “golden afternoon” until just over the line of the victory of the Women’s Suffrage movement, focusing on three sisters and one of their daughters.  Every member of the family has their own dreams and projects, delighting in the cornucopia life offers and open to the changing backdrop of a world growing modern far more rapidly than in previous generations.  Split into three sections, Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian, the ups and downs of the family are a lens through which Rose Macaulay examines what it means to be a “modern woman”, a concept that remains the same on paper over the book’s 40-year span but which shifts wildly to fit reality’s needs, as well as the value of living life adventurously, embracing existence for all it’s worth.  It’s an utterly delightful book, and the character of Imogen, one of the children who becomes the protagonist and thematic distiller in the novel’s latter half, is one of the most lovable and individual characters I’ve ever seen in English literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

You don’t need me to tell you what Nineteen Eighty-Four is about – its nightmarish tale of an everyman’s quest to escape a totalitarian Hell, only to be entrapped by his own triumphs, is still the greatest dystopian novel ever written.  Written out of disgust at Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union, Orwell’s vision of a nation that vivisects all agency from its people is horrifying and unforgettable.  Lingo from the constructed language of the book, Newspeak, has filtered into real-life English, and the work has profoundly affected not just science fiction literature but the psyche of the Western world.  For me, the totality of Winston Smith’s defeat, stripping his mind and soul to the bolts, is so chilling and well-executed that no other story of its type can even compare.  It’s a howl of terror, and a reminder to never give up your autonomy in the face of a comforting lie.

The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen (1941)

Kenneth Patchen was one of the most freewheeling, larger-than-life poets of the 20^th century, breaking all the rules and plunging into big ideas and big emotions with every ounce of energy he had.  The Journal of Albion Moonlight, his response to World War II before it ensnared the United States, is breathtaking in its surrealism and impact.  Structured in the form of a journal kept by a man traveling with companions across a nightmarish America in the throes of war and religious apocalypse, Patchen begins his journey with the murder of an angel and barrels ahead from there.  I was completely floored by this novel, not only by its imagery but by its raw emotion and conviction, and the bravery of its anti-war stance in the face of an evil that humanity still hasn’t fully understood decades after it murdered millions and threatened to destroy the Western world.  Intense both in its personal stake for Patchen and its universal resonance, the novel is totally unique and will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Never Ask the End by Isabel Paterson (1933)

Of all the novels to follow the example of Virginia Woolf’s late-career triumphs, Never Ask the End might be the best, and is certainly my favorite.  Its plot is almost nil – two American women vacation together, meet a friend, travel with him in Europe and parts of America, then go back to their lives.  It’s in the prose, and wise insight, where the reader finds unparalleled riches.  Moving between lush, yet standard, prose and kaleidoscopic interior monologue, Isabel Paterson depicts the inner worlds of her characters with stunning, surprising beauty, with an astonishing passage on almost every page.  A poor seller in its day, Paterson’s novel was likely kept from long-term recognition by the literary world because of her last book, a foundational work of Libertarianism.  As off-putting as her late-career fixation is to readers like me, don’t let that keep you from discovering this wonderful novel, a feast for the mind and soul.  Like all her books it’s terribly rare, but you can download a free PDF of the book here: https://mises.org/books/never_ask_the_end_paterson.pdf

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau (1947)

An odd, nervous man gets on a bus, fumbles with his hat, mutters, and exits.  This non-event is taken by Raymond Queneau, one of France’s most irrepressible literary intellects, and retold dozens of times, each one a variation on storytelling technique and linguistic architecture.  From one telling where every sentence ends in an exclamation point, to ones in different accents and others where words are diced to bits, Exercises in Style spins the reader’s head with every one.  The 1958 English translation by Barbara Wright is one of the great feats of translation, essential reading for anyone with writer’s block or who thinks they’ve seen everything literature has to offer.

Nature Stories by Jules Renard (1894)

The work of an artist dedicated to looking at the real world with clarity and free from sentimentality, Jules Renard’s Nature Stories examines the animals of his country life with incredible simplicity and grace.  Most of the book is a collection of tiny sketches of animals, such as the peacock, dressed in his wedding clothes for a bride who never arrives, or the snake, whose entire entry is “Too long.”  Anchoring the book are scenes with his daughter as she encounters animals, eventually witnessing the reality of death, with it left unknown if she is wiser for having seen what she has.  Renard was hugely empathetic to people and animals, even when depicting the nastiest moments of life, and even in the saddest moments of this book we can see truth and wisdom, always filtered through his sly humor and irony.

Poems and Stories by Paul Rochberg (1990)

George Rochberg was one of America’s more successful Avant-Garde Classical composers, starting off strong in the 1940’s with an exciting Serialist language.  His son Paul wrote poetry, and was recognized in his high school years for his talent.  Then, at age 20, he developed a brain tumor, and died.  The tragedy of this shook George to his very core, and he found that the compositional language he had been using was totally incapable of helping him process his grief.  It was by reading, and setting, Paul’s poetry in the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s that George began to change his voice, and his pieces based on those poems are perhaps his best, and one of the must undeservedly obscure sets of Classical works in the 20^th century.  Many years later he self-published his son’s collected writings, and even without the haunting specter of Paul’s early death these pieces are an exquisite achievement.  Most of the poems are tiny, free-verse dreams, almost as pared-down as haiku and opening windows into unknown worlds.  If Paul had lived he could have achieved his potential as a spiritual descendant of Lorca and could have become a major name in American verse, and I’m enormously grateful to have had the chance to read his full oeuvre in the stewardship of his greatest champion.  One day I hope to perform all of George Rochberg’s settings for voice and piano, and maybe I can inspire others to seek them out, as well as Paul’s singular poetic voice.

Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini (1981)

This book might be considered a cheat, as it is in the form of an encyclopedia.  However, it is an encyclopedia of an alien world, written in that world’s language, and is as baffling as it is lovable.  Eschewing all reality in favor of freewheeling nonsense, the book’s artist, Luigi Serafini, takes the reader through impossible machinery, copulating lovers turning into an alligator, and an uncountable array of creatures and buildings that defy physics and logic in the most hilarious and eye-popping way.  Complimenting his bonkers vision is an invented, indecipherable text, made up of delicate, roping letters and so complete in its facsimile that linguists have made repeated attempts to translate it, even though doing so totally misses the point.  The book is a triumph of aesthetics over utility, rewarding the viewer who can see through initial confusion and bask in the glory of Serafini’s insane, satirical dream world.  Easily my favorite art book of all time.

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair (1922)

May Sinclair straddled the worlds of popular and elitist fiction with great success, and her books were bestsellers even when she honed her prose into a scalpel to slice into the heart of the experimental.  She invented the term “stream-of-consciousness” while reviewing Dorothy Richardson’s massive serial novel Pilgrimage, and crystallized her own language in her still-read novel Mary Olivier: A Life, depicting a middle-class woman’s life from birth to the cusp of her senior years with great skill and insight.  Her follow-up, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, distills Mary Olivier’s techniques into a novella-length straight shot through an unimportant woman’s life from birth to death, and it hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.  Harriet Frean is the very picture of middle-class insignificance, her life a sum total of missed chances, minuscule dramas and regrets.  A portrait of such a person could be pointless with a lesser writer’s skills, but Sinclair’s deft sentences drive the reader like a train, making us feel not only the disappointing sadness of her protagonist’s existence but also the terrifying acceleration of life as sameness makes days, months and years slip through our fingers.  The effect only grows, even through to the final scene, where the very last word seizes the reader’s heart and flings them into space.  At nearly 100 years old the book still has the power to arrest a reader in their tracks – an experience as depressing as it is moving.

Darkness Visible by William Styron (1990)

Originally published as an article in Vanity Fair, Darkness Visible is William Styron’s heartbreaking portrait of his struggle with suicidal depression.  Clinical depression was severely misunderstood in Styron’s day, and the success of his memoir boosted its profile, making the book an essential document in medical history as well as literature.  Styron’s depression was crushing and total, weighing him down even when gaining world-conquering recognition for his work and considerable financial rewards.  That is the terrible nature of it, sitting on your chest like a night terror demon even when others don’t see a logical reason for you to be depressed – people rarely understand the chemical cause, and that neglect can keep people in need from getting help.  Styron didn’t commit suicide, of course, but his dark, lonely road to its brink, even up to the very face of oblivion, is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, but also terribly beautiful, and the reader emerges with Styron from the darkest night, reborn.  By its very nature a triggering work, Darkness Visible is not for everyone, but for those who dare to walk with Styron in his ordeal it is a treasure of insight and humanity.

This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (2014)

Perhaps my favorite Young Adult work, This One Summer follows preteen Rose as she goes with her family on their usual summer vacation to an eastern Canadian beach cabin and her annual meeting with her friend Windy.  While her family has been doing the trip for as long as she can remember, this year she bears witness to a tragic local drama, dips a toe in the first waters of emotional and sexual development, and reckons with her distant, depressed mother, who reckons with demons of her own.  The graphic novel has some of the most perfect drawn storytelling I’ve ever seen – the framing, acting and pacing are utterly flawless, hitting every emotional note and striking a delicate balance between likable style and dramatic intensity.  The issues grappled with speak to children, teenagers and adults alike, empathizing with characters wrestling unanswerable questions, personal exploration and issues that most people would have trouble dealing with.  In the end, Rose goes home, changed forever and hopefully wiser, as we all hope for as we grow up.  This is one of the few books I would forbid to be adapted into a movie simply because it is too perfect as it is to be mucked with, and I recommend it for basically everybody.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (2005)

Sarah Vowell is a lovable oddball, obsessed with history and death, and Assassination Vacation uses a series of trips she takes to landmarks significant to the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley to explore some of the strangest and darkest moments in American history with unique humor and personality.  Approaching her subjects with inexhaustible curiosity and the quirky irony of her essayist, NPR-correspondent life, Vowell’s bouncy, hilarious examinations of these grim stories is both a first-class education and a touching personal odyssey.  I was introduced to this work through the abridged audiobook, which features an all-star guest voice cast, including John Stewart, Catherine Keener, Stephen King, Brad Bird and many others, and even an original score by Michael Giacchino, fresh off his score for The Incredibles, in which Vowell voiced Violet Parr.  I could recommend the audiobook for Brad Bird’s hysterical performance as Charles Giteau, James Garfield’s deranged murderer, but the whole thing is a gem and one of my favorite books of all time.

Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward (1929)

In the early decades of the 20^th century, before comics were codified, the “wordless novel” emerged as a genre, starting with the woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and spreading to artists throughout the Western world.  The pinnacle of this format may be Gods’ Man, the first of a series of such novels by the incredible illustrator Lynd Ward, and it is my favorite-ever version of the Faust story.  Chronicling a poor artist who makes a deal with a mystery man for a brush that will bring him fame and fortune, the book follows his rise to glory, his betrayal and downfall by fate, attempt at a fresh start and ultimate destruction when his contract comes due. One would be hard-pressed to find a book melding drawn storytelling with Expressionism better than this, as huge Gothic cityscapes vault around the characters and every emotion is profound and wild. Ward’s woodcut skill was unparalleled, and the boldness and vigor of his work help make Gods’ Man the best graphic novel from before the medium properly existed. Ward never again achieved the same level of storytelling and craft, but Gods’ Man will live one as a masterpiece of its kind.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

I put off dealing with Woolf for far too long, mostly because of a guy I knew in high school who was totally insufferable and swore up and down that Mrs. Dalloway was the greatest novel ever written.  Now that I’ve actually read it, I can say that avoiding it was a serious mistake, as it’s one of the most beautiful books of the 1920’s.  The premiere stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway depicts a single day in a woman’s life as she prepares for a party, meets people, and throws the party.  That’s it.  But Woolf’s gorgeous prose, the hallucinatory intensity of her images, the sympathy and wisdom she sees her characters with, and the life-affirming warmth of the narrative, are second to none, a revelatory experience for the first-time reader.  Even though I’ve only read it once I know I’ll return to it again and again with the same wide-eyed wonder as I had the first time around.  What a lovely way to close out a collection of 30 essential books.

From Benny to Beth to Nelson to Me

The quote at the top of this blog is from D.H. Lawrence, out of his prose-poem collection Pansies, and that warmth of life keeps old books fresh for someone like me.  With media, another warmth can be passed along – the lives of the previous owners, lives that can stretch back quite far.  For famous folk we call these “association copies”, ones that have noteworthy owners’ names in the flyleaves, or contain other marginalia and ephemera that act as proof that the paper touched livelier hands than ours.  Among my chanced-upon association copies are a paperback of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics that was previously owned by Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering, the original trading card game.  I also have a copy of Elinor Wylie’s Black Armour previously owned by Paul Jordan Smith, who authored the first critical guide to Joyce’s Ulysses, A Key To Ulysses.  But these are easy ones to catch – a more enticing challenge is to track information for previous owners about whom you know nothing.  Just recently, Brad Bigelow, the author of the Neglected Books Page, did a bit of online digging in the previous owner of his copy of Appius and Virginia, an unusual 1930’s novel by the mysterious G. E. Trevelyan, about whom he is writing a Masters’ thesis.  The owner, Elizabeth Seeber, turned out to have lived a striking, independent life, one that felt fitting of a reader of Trevelyan, herself a stubborn solo act in the face of society’s oppression of women in the first half of the 20th century.  And today, I’m writing because I stumbled across an association copy of my own that hit me on multiple levels.  And it begins with an oft-mourned talent of the fin-de-siecle, Trumbull Stickney.

A passionate scholar and author, Stickney published a single book of poems, Dramatic Verses, which contained some work written while he was only 19 or 20, while a student at Harvard.  While teaching at that same school, he started experience splitting headaches and “blind spells”, and in 1904 he died from a brain tumor at the age of 30.  His poetry was collected and republished in 1905 by Houghton Mifflin, and just today I came across a first edition of that volume for a very reasonable price.  While Stickney never achieved genre-defining greatness, his melancholic, lyrical work showed great promise and technical mastery, singing more sweetly than many other Decadent wannabees from that era, and they have remained a niche favorite in scholarly circles.  One of his poems, “Song”, was featured in the film The Good Shepherd: Michael Gambon’s character, an aging, vain English professor, tries to impress and woo Matt Damon’s character by reciting a poem he claims to be working on, but is actually plagiarized from Stickney’s earlier poem, a clever move considering Stickney’s obscurity at that time, and more so now.

The association I found is in two parts, and we’ll start with the earlier one, one that required a bit of research that certainly paid off.  My copy of The Poems of Trumbull Stickney was purchased in the first year of its publication, right in Stickney’s homebase of Harvard, by one Alfred L. Benshimol.  Cursive writing frequently infuriates me for its unreadability, but in Benshimol’s case his legibility was high, and I was able to find out a bit about him.  He was indeed a Harvard graduate, and was given a teaching certificate for high school French in 1912, but through moves unknown to me wound up becoming the principal of Los Angeles’s Belmont High School in 1934, deep in the inner city and deep in the Great Depression.

I found a remembrance of “Benny” from the LA Times, dating from 1985, that paints a fine picture of a defiantly old-school teacher who emphasized discipline, school uniform policies and learning for self-improvement and self-actualization.  He made all the boys wear neckties to class, probably a goofy move for an LA public high school at that time, but was also known to quote Shakespeare in surprising moments and for a variety of occasions, and made a great point to stress the importance of higher education in a time of serious economic crisis.  This included his female students, whom he believed would be hit especially hard by the poor economy and needed every leg up they could get.  Many suspected his ivy-league credentials, but few knew he was a Harvard man of all things, and nobody understood why he taught at Belmont – but he was certainly an admired and loved figure while there.

This name, of course, meant nothing to me when I pulled this from the shelf, aside from the date and place, which was charming.  The real hook was on the opposite flyleaf, and proves the book to be part of a rich, scattered library.  If you ask anybody who has been writing poetry in Seattle for more than 20 years or so, they will all know two names, the men who taught and fostered Seattle’s poetry scene from their posts at the University of Washington in the 1950’s and ’60’s: Theodore Roethke and Nelson Bentley.  Roethke is widely read all over the country to this day, and rightfully so, but Bentley’s name has mostly circulated exclusively among Northwest poets.  He was beloved more as a teacher than as a poet, though he did get his accolades in his day, including an invitation to read at the White House in 1978.  While I’ve never been a fan of his work, he does ring an affectionate note to me for a couple of reasons, such as how his private library seeped into local bookstores and continues to circulate.  I’ve scooped up a couple of volumes myself, first editions of the first books of Richard Wilbur and Richard Gillman – the latter volume was given to Bentley with a note by the great editor Rolfe Humphries, and I picked it up for the princely sum of $1.  I’ve passed by others whose actual contents interested me less – William Empson’s poems, a volume by Vi Gale – but not this one.  Most of them feature Bentley’s distinctive pencil signature, but here we see an inscription: “Nelson from Beth, Oct. 1, 1955”.

I can hear you saying it already: “How do you know it’s Nelson Bentley’s book if there’s just his first name?”  It’s not just the Nelson I’m seeing here, it’s the Beth.  In 1952, Bentley married fellow poet Beth Singer, who became Beth Bentley, and she too was a teacher in the area for many years, though not at the University of Washington.  Also like Bentley, her first book wasn’t published until she was well into middle age.  Nelson’s first book, Sea Lion Caves, was published when he was in his late 40’s, and Beth’s first book, Phone Calls from the Dead, was published when she was in her early 50’s.  I’m a fan of Phone Calls from the Dead and her follow-up, Country of Resemblances, but before today hadn’t found any association materials from her.  Presumably she just found it in a used bookstore in Seattle, where it had settled after floating up after after leaving Benny’s hands in L.A.

There’s a thread of love connecting these points in time: a poet who died before his work hit its stride, a Harvard scholar who worked for years to better the lives of inner-city high schoolers on the other side of the country, to being a gift from one young poet to her poet spouse before either of them had been published.  It’s only by good fortune that their names have survived to this day, and here I write, more obscure than any of them, as the newest passenger on a train of history that this book has made.  I’m not sure I’ll mark my own name – maybe this post is enough.  Or maybe I’m not good enough to see my name inscribed next to a poet as good as Beth Bentley’s.  Whoever takes the book after me, I hope they feel the thread, the seat of their train booth, and the warmth of lovely, old things.

~PNK

Within Limits – Review: Star Kites by Mark Valentine

A fisherman can always spot another fisherman from afar – this goes true for Mark Valentine and his folk.  At various turns fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and musician, Valentine has quietly burrowed away in arcane artistic soil, digging his own tunnels to depths few people ever reach.  If he can be called any one thing on a professional level, the level where society demands one must peg themselves, it’s “fan”, however odious that may sound.  Starting off in the published world as a contributor to fan magazines, he has grown into an author of more than 20 published books, editor/introducer of quite a lot more than that, and the editor of Wormwood, a journal on fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature.  This journal, as with nearly half of Valentine’s authored books, is published by Tartarus Press, a specialty publisher of contemporary and rediscovered weird fiction, whose output largely consists of finely-produced limited editions that sell out quickly.  It is this last area where Valentine seems to dwell with a dark relish – his career almost delights in its obscurity, as it puts him in league with the writers and artists he works so hard to champion.  I can’t help but be drawn to a figure like him because, well, I’m one of him, a navigator in the Sargasso sea of forgotten art – frequently tangled in the foliage but entranced by its irrepressible life force.

I first encountered Valentine’s work by searching for blogs on obscure books deserving of attention, and came across Wormwoodiana, the blog companion to Wormwood written by Valentine and his good friend Douglas A. Anderson, editor of The Annotated Hobbit.  I was struck not only by the wide banquet table of writers I’d never heard of, and the quality of the appraisals of their output, but also by how consistently Valentine and Anderson were able to mine a seemingly narrow genre focus and come up with effortless depth.  I also came across a video created by R. B. Russell, Tartarus’s chief editor, that interviewed Valentine as a book collector rather than as a writer.  His tastes and peculiarities have brought him to create something of a private research library for fans of his favored authors, and seeing rows and rows of scarce first editions from a century or more ago made my mouth water – thought admittedly I don’t think I’d want to read all of his books, or even half of them.  The achievement, noble or otherwise, is startling, and a few titles he has are rare beyond belief.  The one I’m the most interested to see the inside of is A Book of Deadly Sonnets by “N. B.”, most likely an eccentric, unprolific writer by the name of Norman Boothroyd.  The book was likely printed privately at his expense, and rarely have I seen such a small book I’ve wanted so badly.

The video is not only a showcase of a collection, but also a portrait of the man, here an incomparably British figure in a tan waistcoat, surrounded by a lifetime’s supply of fin-de-siècle literature that only a connoisseur of the Old, Old World could assemble.  His darling authors gravitate around that most glorious star in artistic history, the Golden Afternoon before the Great War, and to a lesser extent the verdant, chaotic reconstruction between it and the second World War.  I haven’t had the pleasure of reading any of his own stories (mostly because they are so hard to get ahold of at modest prices, or at all), but his own descriptions and publisher blurbs prove their allegiance to his fan interests.  For Valentine, collecting is an art a lifetime in the perfection, so much so that favored sellers, and fellow travelers in book appreciators, are given obituaries in his blog.

He has also, with the partnership of his wife Jo, self-published his own fine books, designing and hand-making extremely limited edition chapbooks of scarce literature, some of it translating authors into English for the first time.  This imprint, Valentine & Valentine, is only advertised on Wormwoodiana, its books are all in editions of 25 only, have all sold out, and have been left without new titles for a few years now.  If there are books I’d like more than A Book of Deadly Sonnets, these titles are among them.  They are mostly poetry, an area Valentine has a periodic but fruitful interest in, and the genre is the one that normal observers might least likely guess he’d have an affinity for.  This is not his fault, or the fault of the public, but more the subtly narrow focus of the mainstream poetry world itself, which, even though it allows for a striking variety in techniques, has an accepted mode of thinking and feeling that doesn’t often allow for certain non-self-conscious aspects of Valentine’s art – those of horror, beauty and wonder for their own sake, something he shares with the Decadent authors who are among his frequent literary haunts.  While early Modernism is among his interests, he more frequently finds writers who care less for technique and movements and more for his own taste needs – bringing us to today’s book, Star Kites.

Published by Tartarus Press in 2013 (and apparently still available), Star Kites is Valentine’s most recent collection of poetry, composed half of Valentine originals and half of “versions” of a slew of late 19th- and early 20th-century poems by authors largely or completely forgotten.  Like all of Tartarus Press’s books in hardback, its plain dust jacket conceals gorgeous boards, and the printing and paper quality are through the roof.  Limited to 250 copies and signed by the author, it was a lucky find for me – it sat at a local book store for so long it made its way to the clearance rack, seemingly just for me to scoop up and adore.  I wasn’t sure what to think when I saw that he had written poetry – something just seemed fishy about the concept – but I was won over as soon as I opened the book to see the results.  His thematic focus is in character: shimmering, elusive portraits of mysterious, dark imagery.  No new techniques are created here, but it’s no matter – I’d call his method Imagistic, a term he uses himself to describe one of his poem “versions”, and the allow his poetic ideas to present themselves untroubled, and with precise timing.  Take, for example, the title poem:

The uneven, rhymeless lines are still sympathetic to effective end-stopping of ideas, and the swirl of exotic and arcane images is pleasantly intoxicating.  Many poems relate scenes of ominous, possibly supernatural design:

Others simplify their microcosms to a needle’s point, and in doing so enter the brain swiftly and silently – a feat achieved a century ago by the Imagists, though few of them, perhaps just Evelyn Scott, attempted his projection of awe in darkness.

They are assured, memorable pieces, indebted to past masters but crafted by a warmly singular mind.  As much as I admire this work, its time passed before it was born – something I’m sure Valentine is aware of.  It is very fitting, then, that the latter half of the book is devoted to his “versions” of other poets’ work, something that he had practiced before but now gets a proper venue here.  The difference between a translation and a version can be seen in a Wormwoodiana post of his, where he offers two English takes on a forgotten poem, originally in French, from the 1890’s literary journal The Spirit Lamp, edited by Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the object of Oscar Wilde’s doomed romantic attachment.  It took Valentine digging several layers beneath the mainstream to even see the poem, but this level of research is everyday for him, and it took a sustained effort in the same area to produce the versions contained here.

The pieces he showcases originate from several different nations and languages, ranging from French to Esperanto, and cross multiple decades, from the 1890’s through the middle of the 20th century.  Some of the pieces were only published in obscure periodicals, such as the 1920’s Romanian Avant-Garde journal Contimporanul (which I thank Valentine for introducing me to), and some were in scarce, self-published volumes.  A couple of well-known poets are featured, like Antonio Machado and Fernando Pessoa, but most are shadowy figures, due variously to early deaths, off-putting personalities, or simply the bad luck of being born in a country that went to pot during the Wars.  Some writers’s lives and careers were so fugitive they edge the tragic, making the inclusion of their work an act of noble rescue, which I can’t help but feeling in the background of much of what I do as an artist.  It’s a remarkable way for Valentine to “give back” as a collector – give back to the reading community, and to a world that demands that people produce in order to prove their right to exist.

It’s this last point that I come back to the older I get, looking back at all the time I’ve spent building my own not-quite-ivory tower of art I admire.  Collecting, accumulating, curating – all are fine pastimes, but they don’t dig ditches.  What is the point, if it doesn’t create something new, or encourage people to spend their money in worthwhile capitalistic venues?  Something can be said for the latter, as the volume got me to check for further available titles by each other authors, bringing me to actual volumes (from other translators) of enticing figures such as Maria Louise Weissmann and George Bacovia, “versioned” twice by Valentine:

The former issue, giving back to the reading public itself, revolves around the central issue in preserving writing in the first place – if it’s not in a book, it can’t live forever.  Most authors who are known are known because of printed books – sturdy, stackable, enduring objects – that preserve their work, and ephemeral publications such as magazines and websites, or even more fragile forms of printing, fade when their readership dies or loses momentum.  Valentine’s quest for unknown greatness began with full books, as did many others’ – I am currently reading A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, an experimental, almost gonzo biography wherein the author recounts his search for the biographical truth of Frederick Rolfe, the eccentric, self-styled “Baron Corvo”, and that journey begins with the author being lent a copy of Rolfe’s first novel, the acclaimed Hadrian VII.  The book has an official permanence in the psyche, and so, in many cases in Star Kites, Valentine had to scour scans and facsimiles of long-vanished periodicals to find worthy poems of which to make versions.  I can relate – it was the same technique I used to make The New Pagans, my anthology of early Modernist American verse, and I am eternally indebted to non-profit internet archives who took the time to track down print copies of elusive magazines and journals and scan them for public view.  I wouldn’t expect every reader of my book to like every poem in it, as hopefully Valentine doesn’t expect all his readers to share each of his nodes of taste, but this is part of the wonderful, organic reality of a free art appreciation society.  We love what we love, and we fight for the recognition of those artists we love who others have left by the wayside, hoping that others do the same for theirs so that our collective unconscious can be fuller and richer.  We’ll naturally differ, so the more people working means that less work is left in the dust, so any collection as varied and sparkling as Star Kites is a welcome addition to the libraries of those who care to further the Cause.

Mark Valentine’s poetry was an endearing surprise, displaying remarkable imagery and sensitive technique, and his versions are a fine accomplishment in curation and good will.  The price point is a bit steep for a book this slim, but, to quote Peter Quennell, “As a reader of modern poetry, I know that, if one enjoys (and it is seldom) one is content to enjoy by ounces”, and ounce for ounce it is a very enjoyable collection.  It’s a rare one by design as well as quality, and its value will grow even as its physical presence fades from view.

~PNK

 

The New Pagans – now availabe on Lulu

So I have a shameless plug to shamelessly plug – I wrote a book myself!  Or rather, I edited an anthology of early-20th-century American free verse poets.  As readers of my blog are aware, I’m a great admirer of early modernist poetry, and in my research I came across a great deal of work that deserves greater exposure and recognition.  I’ve collected the best of this work in The New Pagans, which mostly features work written between 1913 and 1922.  Included are figures foundational to Imagism (such as Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher), a loose movement of the 1910’s that started in London with native Brits and American expats and was the birth of modernist poetry in English.  Also included are major and unknown names of the New York little magazine scene (such as Alfred Kreymborg, Jeanne D’Orge and many others), as well as a number of writers from Chicago and more obscure scenes like California and Boston.  My contributions come in the form of introductions to each poet’s work, as well as a preface that charts the development of American free verse from the 1910’s into the breakthrough moment in the early ’20’s when enough major poets were writing in the form that it was no longer considered outside the mainstream.  The book can save readers a lot of time, effort and money trying to accrue costly, rare originals of books or scrawling through internet databases for low-quality scans, and helps to show how history is usually shaped by those names we’ve unjustly forgotten.

Available now on Lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/peter-nelson-king/the-new-pagans-an-anthology-of-american-free-verse-1895-1922/paperback/product-23784849.html

Till next time,

~PNK

Within Limits: A Cherry Gem from Hawthorn House

If there’s one thing I like about American society, it’s that you can set out to do pretty much anything you want as a career and nobody will stop you.  If you’ve got skills, capital and gumption you can carve your own niche and sally forth, and as long as you pay your taxes the government won’t partake in hackle-raising.  However, because many more people than are capable of running their own businesses start them, the road is littered with the corpses of blips and wipeouts, and if you’re itching to become your own boss you have dozens of examples in your field to avoid emulating.  As can be expected, arts ventures often begin as retirement projects for restless people, lured in not only by the permissiveness of American economy but also by shaking off the drudgery of their previous worklives and spending their days seeing real products of their labor and selling them how they see fit.  In the fine book world there is the case of Thomas Mosher, a native of Maine who started the endearing Mosher Press after an adult life of dead-end jobs and personal tragedy.  His private press work occupied the latter part of his life and the editions he produced, a combination of classics and new traditionalist poets, are highly attractive, just the sort of thing we all want to find from small arts operations in New England.  While Mosher’s love of literature was lifelong he had a late start to the printing game – a detail not shared by today’s printer, Edmund Thompson.

Thompson began his working life in the printing business, spending a good 10 years or so in the firms of William Edwin Ridge and Peter Belleson before poor health forced him to retreat to the small town of Windham, Connecticut in 1932.  I’m not exactly sure what infirmity he acquired that forced him into the country, but the result was the founding of his own private press, Hawthorn House.  Like Mosher Press, as well as many other small presses (like Golden Cockerel), Hawthorn House’s offerings were a mix of good and forgettable, though Hawthorn’s work included much more low-level work than those others with its standing as a friendly provincial publishing house.  Their work’s craftsmanship places it far above the firms who make the likes of high school yearbooks and Freemason directories, sort of a special edition version of instances where publishers like the aforementioned yearbookers were tasked with printing literary stuff, such as in this post from Wormwoodiana about an anonymously published book of Verses & Translations issued in the bowels of Northern England.  One example that I have came not because I was searching for the firm, but rather from my interest in reading the complete verse of A.E. Coppard, story author extraordinaire.

Coppard is remembered primarily as the author of roughly two dozen collections of short stories, a form in which he was considered a master.  The shorts of his that I’ve gotten a chance to read are highly accomplished, possessing a wonderful sense of atmosphere and well-chosen detail, and occasionally dipping into the realms of horror and the supernatural, a big plus for me.  The portion of his oeuvre I’ve read more thoroughly is his poetry, a small part of his work and now forgotten, and in my opinion unjustly.  I mentioned his first poetry book in my article on the verse of Peter Quennell, both of them published initially by the fledgling Golden Cockerel Press.  Those were Hips & Haws and Pelagea and Other Poems, published in 1922 and 1926 respectively, and as they are Cockerel books they usually command less-than-appealing prices at sale – and in the first book’s case in spite of the poor proofreading quality Coppard himself saw in its publication.  This shouldn’t stop you from reading it, however, as I was quite taken with many of the poems in the book, moving between traditional and free verse as the mood struck the author, and probably better off for it.  Coppard had a quirky, old-world sensibility about poetic color and subject matter, a fine fit for GC’s printing aesthetics.  My favorites are probably “Eclipse” (a poem I intend to set to music someday), “A Carol for Margaret Chester”, “Yokohama Garland” and “The Young Man Under the Walnut Tree”, which contains one of my favorite poetic phrases, “Love that is borne of wonder and dies on the empty air”.  Pelagea and other poems I remember much less but thought was lighter on excellence, though it’s a fine companion piece nonetheless.  If you’re cheap like me, you may want to settle for the Collected Poems from 1928, published by Jonathan Cape, that has all the poems from these two books and a charming preface by Coppard going over the different editions of his poetry books.  While he called Hips & Haws a cheap affair, he also mentioned Yokohama Garland, an expensive limited edition of Hips published by the Philadelphia-based Centaur Press in 1926.  This lovely little number was limited to 500 copies and was signed by Coppard, as well as its illustrator (!) Wharton Esherick, better known as a sculptor, and I’ve yet see a copy cheaper than $90 or so.  This brings us to his third collection, Cherry Ripe, which like Hips/Yokohama has two different limited edition releases, this time from the same year, 1935.  The first, from Tintern Press (who?), I haven’t seen, and may never see, as the second, from Hawthorn House, is so charming that I’d never betray it for another edition.

A pert octavo housed in a cozy slipcase, Cherry Ripe aims for typesetting good enough to gift and hits the keepsake bullseye.  Utilizing a typeface I’ve never seen before, possibly designed by the Thompsons, each poem is expertly set with crisp-yet-warm printing and embellished with decorations by Valenti Angelo, whose linocut work graced the pages of many coveted editions.  A taste:

This edition also features a biographical note by George Brandon Saul, a longtime professor of English at the University of Connecticut, as well as a detailed publication history of all the poems in the book, as well as a checklist of first editions of all of Coppard’s books, pamphlets and leaflets up to that point.  The Hawthorn House edition also includes three more poems than the Tintern Press edition, including “Easter Day”, which is probably the best of the lot, making this edition a serious improvement on its slight predecessor and a sure collector’s item for Coppard fans.

However, there is trouble, trouble in the department of the volume’s general verse quality – most of the poems are simply not very interesting.  That picture above shows the title poem, whose purposefully quaint, 17th-century feel is similar to the bulk of the volume, and these constrictions extend beyond just format.  Coppard’s previous volumes of poetry showed a real flair for various subject matter and approaches, with even the mediocre items enlivened by their being couched in an engagingly cosmopolitan whole.  Cherry Ripe is akin to a faux antique, something from a gift shop – not necessarily bad but exuding a certain disingenuousness that cheapens the experience.  Obviously, the aesthetic qualities of the book are more than enough to bowl over book collectors like myself, and even if the verse leans into gift shop quality that’s not necessarily the book’s fault, if that makes any sense.  I mean, the handmade paper has a watermark, for Pete’s sake!

If all this sounds appealing enough to you I won’t stop you from seeking this volume out.  It’s cute as a button, a great resource for Coppard readers and filled with a genuine love of the bookmaking game – everything a special limited edition should be.  Now if someone would just send me a free copy of that Yokohama Garland…

~PNK

Within Limits: the prime of William Closson Emory

Is scarcity quality?  Does it matter if a statue is made of platinum or tin, if it looks the same?  This question is posed, along with the same answer, whenever a limited edition is published, and Within Limits probes the concept in a series of reviews of limited edition books.  The whole concept of limited editions is to nip poor sales in the bud by making it part of the publishing design.  Books are purposefully printed on low runs, usually below 1000 copies, and advertised as such with the intention of never reprinting the books in the same form.  The from-the-get-go rarity of these books imbues them with a sense of preciousness, the sense that if a reader wants to get a chance to read the thing they’d better buy fast.  That is, if they want to read the sort of things that are published with this marketing tack, which is rarely something with commercial legs.  Some mass-produced works do have special limited editions, often with exclusive design elements and fancy materials, but only with that easily-available version published alongside it to keep the sales and word-of-mouth up enough for someone to want to bother buying the limited one.  Those are all fine and good, but what we’re interested in here is the stuff that’s only available in limited quantities, the stuff that the publisher figured was good, but only for a few hundred people to read.  These books feel all the more precious to me, and as this series will prove the most common genre for this type of release is poetry, which has never been a cash cow and is poorly understood by the general population.  True to form, these books also feature exquisite design and fine materials, but their inherent lack of an audience makes their existence akin to a diamond sitting at the bottom of the ocean, theoretically priceless but for most people not worth the trouble.  The problem is, I like this trouble.  And for these articles I’m willing to take the plunge so you can see whether you should, too.

Detroit has not proven itself in popular history as a haven for modernist literature.  There are certainly famous writers from there, like Elmore Leonard, Thomas Ligotti and the dreaded Mitch Albom, but one’d be hard pressed to pin down anything like a “scene” or a real modernist sentiment, nothing like Chicago in the 1910’s and ’20’s.  This isn’t a knock on anybody in particular, just a state of affairs – you’d need a certain density of interest, as well as loose cash, to support a scene, and as far as I know Detroit just didn’t have it.  As I’ve always felt that smart, creative artists can pop up anywhere, it’s long been a pleasure of mine to see worthy works emerge from corners we dare call far-flung simply because they aren’t Famously Fecund for this sort of thing, and for this inaugural Within Limits I’m happy to look at a righteous weirdie from the Motor City, William Closson Emory.

Emory has a certain distinction for this series in that his only solo books were limited editions, and there weren’t many of those at that.  Among other dearthful attributes are his biography, which is missing from any source searchable over the web, and there has never been serious academic study of his work in particular.  My information on him was less found as it was accumulated, like dust bunnies, from the cataloging and examination of other artists’ work.  For example I know that he was an acquaintance of Carl Sandburg, but only because of Worldcat’s listing of Sandburg’s Chicago Poems that mentions that one copy, somewhere in the world, was inscribed and presented to Emory at some point in time.  It’s odd and a bit sad that the best biography of Emory is a single paragraph in the back notes of Harriet Monroe’s The New Poetry, a vast collection of American and British verse published in Poetry Magazine and a seminal guidebook for the poetry of its time.  Monroe was one of the few people really taken by Emory’s talent at the time, and as such ten of his poems were published in Poetry during his most active period in the 1920’s.  Allen Tate was another admirer, though I only know this because he complained of the lack of Emory’s work in Our Singing Strength, an anthology of American poets edited by the great Alfred Kreymborg, in contrast to his full two pages of poems by a supposedly inferior poet, Jeanne d’Orge (who I’ll get to in a later Within Limits).  Again, it’s odd that I am forced to site a source that only mentions Emory in passing in order to flesh out a biography, something that should be available in public sources.  As it stands, I know that Emory was born in Massachusetts in 1894, grew up in Honolulu, served in the first World War, and made his living working for a steel manufacturer in Detroit, writing as a hobby – and that’s hardly enough for a blog post, let alone something with real substance.

My personal introduction to Emory’s work was “Love in the West”, a story that appeared in the seminal Paris-based magazine transition in the late ’20’s and was later collected in Transition Stories in ’29.  It’s in a highly elusive but excellent subgenre of writing from the time, the spoof movie scenario, wherein a silent film is related as a loose script.  While this type of prose piece is a new discovery of mine, it’s more than exciting enough for someone to do a review of the format, one that drew E.E. Cummings to giving it a shot in 1925.  His piece “The Vanity Fair Prize Film Scenario”, published as part of his regular column in Vanity Fair in the 1920’s, is legitimately one of the funniest humor pieces I’ve ever read, and you can read it in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany, reprinted after many years of oblivion just this last July.  “Love in the West” isn’t quite the achievement of the “Prize Film Scenario” but it certainly raised my eyebrows, if not turning them into radishes.  The plot is a queer jive of silent melodrama tropes, with a man raised to worship money pursuing a romance with a human-sized $100 bill in a world populated by anthropomorphic foodstuffs.  People’s eyes turn into vegetables to display emotions.  Potatoes and dandelions make for extras and stumbling blocks to what is certainly a romance for the ages.  What other story can contain a paragraph closer like this?

“Herrman’s eyes grow little onions and he weeps.  Growing crowd of gossiping sweet peas and orchids obscure him from our view.”

Obviously I had to see more – no man who writes a story like that is worthy of total neglect.  This burning curiosity, perhaps a foolhardy one, brought me to reading the whole of his solo book output, an oeuvre which begs for discussion as part of the weirdo underbelly of American literature.  Three books appeared under his name, two of which I’ll actually discuss because the third, Love in Detroit, is rubbish.  Limited edition rubbish, one with a neat 1930’s dust jacket, but rubbish nonetheless.  The other two are striking achievements in literary ambition without anchoring to any group or quality standard, and while their reading experiences were occasionally bumpy I was very glad to have found them.

1929 was the year of the Crash, but also the year of Emory, as the two books of his worth reading (as well as the Transition Stories collection with “Love in the West”) were both published in that year, both in extremely scarce limited editions signed by the author that I was a bit shocked I was able to purchase in the first place.  Their publishers were “name only” affairs, for one thing – one a bookstore rather than a press, and the other a goof.  We’ll start with the goof, for goof’s sake – be still, a poetry collection issued in an edition limited to 215 copies by The Lotus Press of Detroit.  In a sense this is the book with the material the most people saw, as many of the items collected were initially published in magazines like Poetry and The Nation, hardly minuscule in their cultural impact, at least when compared to the likes of Transition and Blues.  The title poem, “be still”, was collected in the third edition of The New Poetry, and thanks to Poetry‘s practice of digitizing and freely publishing the entirety of their back catalog, the internet age has a chance of actually reading some of this stuff.  If his moment in the sun of modernist acceptance was brief it was at least captured by an enduring vessel, but I was unable to turn up any appreciations of Poetry that mention Emory even in passing.  Harriet Monroe may have been alone in insisting that he had talent, at least on the editorial side, and so perhaps his only hope for a book-length collection would have been a “press” started by “more than one person”.  The Lotus Press existed to publish two books, be still and The Midland City, an assemblage of acidic satires on academic figures by William Ellery Leonard, a strange and compelling author who had won some praise years earlier for eulogizing his wife’s suicide in a sonnet sequence entitled Two Lives.  Each book was negotiated into press over the mail by Nolan Miller, an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin (where Leonard taught for many years) who claimed to be two men rather than one as a cover.  (Confusion arose when I was researching this, as there is a current Lotus Press based in Detroit that has nothing at all to do with Miller’s private joke.)  Typeset and printed by Miller himself and sold to hardly anybody, the books are curious artifacts of hobbyist publishing and are destined to possess alluring qualities beyond their content, although the formatting of be still is certainly enticing.  A tall-‘n’-narrow octavo with no spine title, bearing only a thin-line lotus logo on the cover, the book appears more like a secret cult handbook found in the desk drawer of a murdered millionaire than something available for sale, and even its table of contents shows a unique approach to typography:

be still collects all of Emory’s published verse, or at least as much as I was able to verify, and is sectioned off to group poems based on loose thematic ties and attitudinal differences.  The first section, “Echoes of a Drum”, contains poems concerning the horrors of the first World War, horrors that Emory had seen firsthand and wasn’t shy about railing against in more than one book.  Contained here is “be still”, arguably his poetic masterpiece and the one with the most reprints and traction:

“be still” proves that not every stream of consciousness is a pleasant one to dip your toes in, as Emory passionately captures the sensations and thoughts of terrified civilians caught in the vortex of war.  Many hallmarks of early modernism are present, such as quick-change perspective shifts, the collage of reality and subconscious, and the unreliability of personal experience tempered with the knowledge that it is the only truth we know.  This is harrowing, nightmarish stuff, looking forwards to the likes of Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight in its depiction of war as the enormous gash Evil cuts in the fabric of the Earth.  The imagery never lingers into purplishness, with adjectives cut with dashes of darting lone nouns.  It also inhabits a world where shell shock, then still a new psychological concept, is as present as air and water.  It’s a remarkable work and I’m glad it has been collected in more than one book, as the crumbling paper of magazines would be a sad final home for verse this good.

Emory had a distinctly left-wing bent to much of his work, and one of his frequent haunts was the socialist magazine New Masses, which was the first venue of more than one poem in this book.  His sympathy for soldiers and civilians was a fine dance partner to his sympathy for workers in a corrupt industrial state, one that he saw up close in his time working for a steel manufacturer in Detroit.  His thoughts on Henry Ford were summed up in this little number, from the section “Brands to be Laid Away for a Bonfire at Dawn”:

It’s always interesting to me how everybody knew at the time that Ford was a racist prick, but everybody conveniently forgot that as the Ford company kept making nice cars.  Emory’s satirical work has a definite nihilistic streak, written from the point of view of a man who sees the Jazz Age as a sinking ship without much of a future to hold onto.  That isn’t to say it’s depressing, but merely to suggest that he may have kept a marionette of Nero playing the violin somewhere in his home.  This era in American poetry was the first one where funny poetry is still funny today (sometimes), and Emory was pretty good at that, too, such as in this poem, which further expresses his disdain with organized religion:

Someone should really collect his modernist prose, as he had a fine ear for dialogue, and those pieces in Transition, as well as Morada and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, could stir up some academic interest if not public interest.  (Perhaps someone could loan me several thousand dollars to publish an Emory reader…?)  be still does have its uneven parts, some poems that were clearly written without the same constructive rigor and others that have just aged poorly (such as “Cabaret”, about the surreal horrors of – gasp – Jazz clubs!!!), but most of it is accomplished and varied and deserves a second look by critics and civilian readers.  The contemporary poet Morton Dauwen Zabel, the only person to review be still on its release, was somewhat critical of the book, but maintained that it revealed “an undisputed (if minor) talent” and had “the stuff whereof pungent contemporary verse is made”, mirroring how many people felt (and still feel) of experimental literature – whether or not they understood it they couldn’t deny the worthiness and passion of its creators.

Glory, a one-act play, was published by Argus Books, a Chicago bookstore, in a gorgeous edition numbered and signed by Emory, printed on stiff, waxy, handmade paper, and bound in striking boards with shimmering, textured covers.  (In fact, the paper has a watermark that just reads “HAND MADE”.)  At a mere 75 copies produced it’s even scarcer than be still but was oddly easier for me to find, and I believe there are still a couple of copies for sale online.  If “be still” and some other poems in the previous book were glimpses of the soul-crushing hellishness of combat, Glory is a plunge, using stark minimalism in staging to trap the audience in the netherworld of shell shock.  Set in an army hospital somewhere in the French countryside during WWI, Glory depicts the immobile living nightmare of three soldiers, confined to beds and heard, but not seen, by the audience.  One man intones a long, eerie monologue, another repeatedly sings a line from some popular song he picked up on the road, and the third screams for a nurse to relieve him of having to spend another second in a room with the other two.  As the scene progresses, the audience begins to hear distant sounds of gunfire and tanks, sounds that build in a terrifying crescendo until, at the dreamlike climax of the first man’s monologue, a bomb hits and the ceiling collapses, killing two of the men.  The complainer, left alive, is turned as hopelessly mad as his dead companions, beginning to sing that same line of a French song he couldn’t stand just a minute ago, as the curtain slowly drops.  It’s a brilliant piece of minimalist staging and could be extremely effective if anybody would try mounting the thing.  I can’t imagine any more people got ahold of this book than be still, as Argus Books, while more legit than the Lotus Press, put out volumes at a scattershot pace at best, with roughly ten volumes published across twenty-six years.  They were certainly creative with their presentations, as Glory is one of the prettiest pieces of bookmaking I’ve ever purchased, and I’d be curious to see some of their other books, such as a 1930 edition of the Collected Tales of Pierre Louÿs.

I regret that I can’t go over Love in Detroit, the third and final book by Emory, but if you ever get a chance to read it you’ll see why I found it unworthy of this article, and my hard-earned cash.  Published in a limited edition by Laughing Dragon Press, a vanity publisher whose name is much more interesting than anything they put out (as far as I know), the stories are cheap, vaguely hardboiled episodes of lowlife antics in Motor City, none of them more compelling than drawling stories you’d overhear at a dive bar.  They’re beneath everything else I’ve seen from Emory and I’m not sure why they even exist, and why the austerity of a limited edition was demanded for their printing.

As I said before I’d be overjoyed to get a chance to edit a William Closson Emory Reader, collecting all his verse, prose pieces and Glory in a neat volume, hopefully along with more biographical information than I’ve been able to find for this article, but the chances of more than a few other people in the universe being as interested in the project as me are slim.  Emory was an odd duck by design, a sly, impish presence in modernist letters whose work could have made a real splash if it had been more marketably consistent.  There is certainly imperfection, and some readers may be turned off by his clear socialist leanings, but I recommend be still and Glory, as well as “Love in the West”, to anybody with a taste for adventure, dark satire, and a literary personality that refuses to be pigeonholed.  God bless the endless fount of great modern art that is the 1920’s – I don’t know what I’d do without you.

~PNK

Sources:

Emory, William Closson.  be still.  Detroit: The Lotus Press, 1929.

Emory, William Closson.  Glory.  Chicago: Argus Books, 1929.

Jolas, Eugene and Sage, Robert (eds.).  Transition Stories: Twenty-Three Stories from “Transition”.  New York: Walter V. McKee, 1929.

Reinitz, Neale.  William Ellery Leonard: the Professor and the Locomotive God.  Madison: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2013.

Monroe, Harriet (ed.).  The New Poetry: an Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English.  New Edition: Revised and Expanded with Biographical and Critical Notes.  New York: Macmillan, 1932.

Zabel, Morton Dauwel.  “War Poems and Others”.  Poetry, vol. 35, no. 4 (Jan. 1930) (pp. 229-230).

Tate, Allen.  “For Assimilators of Culture”.  Poetry, vol. 36, no. 2 (May 1930) (pp. 110-112).

A Quimbo Primer, and some filth

This past Saturday I popped into the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, a book collecting extravaganza featuring 94 sellers and two full days of shopping and goggling.  Words fail in describing the experience of seeing rows and rows of beautifully preserved wonders, including intact books from the 17th century, original prints of fantasy illustrations, piles of Arkham House limited edition books in their original dust jackets, and so much more.  I was able to hold and peer at 1st editions of books I never thought I’d get to see up close, such as Stephen Crane’s two lone books of poetry, The Black Riders and War is Kind, and James Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, a steal at only $8,000.  Yes, everything was pretty outrageously priced, making the fair more museum than market, but it was completely worth the modest entry fee.  The highest price tag I actually saw was on a huge 17th century book on sea exploration, including some excellent illustrations and marbled paper edges, that was being offered for over $162,000.  There were occasionally affordable items, though surely they jest even at the lower prices, as I saw a 1923 anthology for sale for around $250 and had snagged it a few months earlier at a library book sale for about $2.  I did walk away with two books: 1.) the rare 1st edition of Adelaide Crapsey’s Verse, one of my favorite poetry books, in impeccable condition; 2.) this:

This seriously obscure volume caught my eye as I was preparing to leave, and my guts informed me that I was not to leave without it.  Crudely printed in a limited edition at the author’s expense, An Old Man in Love and The Quimbo Lexicon is one of the strangest books I’ve ever laid hands on, and that’s saying something considering I own both Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté and Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus.  The book consists of two parts, the first part’s description offering the only clue to its authorship – Frank Harris, one of literature’s most famous liars.  Harris was an Irish writer who worked in America, editing Pearson’s Magazine for many years and authoring a handful of popular novels during the 1910’s.  In 1922 he unleashed his “epic”, a four-volume work titled My Life and Loves.  This “autobiography” was an outrageous tapestry of horsehooey, largely detailing a parade of encounters with sex workers that probably never happened and bucketfuls of sexual gossip about celebrities of the day, an interesting move considering he was friends with dozens of famous literary figures who probably didn’t appreciate their company being dragged through brothel mud.  The book was immediately banned in several countries, including bans in the U.S. and England that lasted for around 40 years, long after his death in 1931.  Observations of an Old Man in Love… purports to be an interlude of sorts to that work, and so one can only presume that Harris is the author of this text, though too much research into the matter would probably get me on some kind of government watch list.  The effect of this text, however, compounded by its sister text, makes the average reader wish it was borne into the Earth sans author, like a disembodied doll’s head found in a hole in a tree.  There is an introduction of sorts, one that I have trouble reading as, because of a binding goof, most of the text was left out in lieu of pages repeated from the end of the book, but the content of the text that survived is sleazy musing, so perhaps being unable to read most of it is a bit of a blessing.  The next section is a series of aphorisms on sexual nonsense, some of it seemingly ripped from a standup routine.  Consider these two pages:

(Notice no. XXX, in that it refers to My Sister and I, a fraudulent memoir of Nietzsche that purported to chronicle an incestuous relationship with his sister – exactly the sort of thing that belongs on a shelf next to My Life and Loves.)  All of this would be creepy if it weren’t so ludicrous to think a normal person would want to read it, and the content is partially saved by Harris’s (or whoever’s) skillful prose and sharp comedic timing.  It’s an odd thing when a reader can say that a writer has good writing skills in spite of himself.

The first part, while certainly eccentric and spit-take-inducing, would hardly be worth talking about if published solo – it’s the Quimbo stuff that sends this volume to the stars.  Can you guess what any of this means?

What is “quimbo”?  According to Harris, “quimbo” is the ultimate word, a word of magical, universal power that occurs in all cultures throughout history, as evidenced by severe paraphrasings of texts classic and possibly invented.  His history and definition of the word reads like a tract for seducing weak-kneed types into a doomsday cult.  This is followed by The Quimbo Lexicon, a dictionary of recognizable English and foreign words with “quimb” glued to the front.  The above spread is just a taste, though the comedic or linguistic value of such nonsense is a mystery to me.  I mean, not just as to how this was supposed to be entertainment, but why anybody would make it at all.  The seller I got this from knew nothing about it, save for his theory that it was written by a lunatic, and it does have that ring of obsessive, repetitive action that mental health sufferers sometimes have, or of a word-doodling project written in the margins of normal work the writer is desperately trying to avoid doing.  It is this very quizzical pointlessness upon which the Quimbo Lexicon ascends from low-level crud into the realm of inspired crud.

The thing of it is, there was precedent for this sort of writing at the time, or rather Observations…Quimbo was a precedent for certain scattered volumes to come.  Literary history isn’t short on satirical statements dressed up as something else, from Thomas Urquhart, famous eccentric and Rabelais translator, publishing wonders like Logopandectesion (a proposal for a new language that descended from nonsense into a vitriolic attack on his colleagues and critics), to Swift’s A Modest Proposal.  In the 20th century writers like Joyce blew the doors open for the possibilities of sardonic and pus-spewing satire in fine letters, and in this vein Harris’s book is another stepping stone after Ulysses and into bold futures of shock literature.  I was reminded of two particular books I’ve read of similar vintages and publication histories: The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathaniel West and Hedyphagetica by Austryn Wainhouse.  The Dream Life of Balso Snell was West’s first book, conceived of during an illness when he was a college student and published by the Paris-based Contact Editions in 1931; the short novel depicts a dream-journey of a man who enters a Trojan horse and encounters episodes of dark humor, puerility and farts.  Austryn Wainhouse translated the works of the Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage for Olympia Press, also an English-language Paris press (though one that specialized in banned erotic literature rather than modernism), and they went ahead and published Hedyphagetica, his only novel, in 1954.  A portrait of Grön, a dystopian society, the novel depicts a handful of vividly horrifying concepts, such as airshows where the planes deliberately crash into spectators and an incident where a scientist turns some members of a military platoon into a different race solely to incite racial tension and fighting.  That being said, the book is one of the most painful reading experiences I’ve ever had, as every sentence is tarred and caltropped with prose so turgid Joseph Conrad would have been proud.  Harris’s book is neither as childishly funny as West’s, nor as wretchedly overladen as Wainhouse’s, so if you need a special jolt of acid, shock and naughty bits I may have a book to recommend, as long as you don’t expect too much.

As you can see Observations/Quimbo is a remarkable book, though whether or not it’s a good one is not only impossible to assess but most likely far from its creator’s mind.  This is literary graffiti, hardly suitable for an evening’s reading enjoyment but fascinating as an artifact.  It’s also a display of what could have been accomplished with spare cash and a bored printing house in the 1920’s, as real work went into the design and typesetting of the book, though the binding leaves quite a bit to be desired.  All in all I hope I’ve made a case for my not having made a terrible mistake in purchasing this for too high a price at an antiquarian book fair.

 

I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.

 

~PNK

Harold Pinter’s Mac and Pendragon Press

Have you ever had a reading “phase”?

This is usually a childhood thing, such as getting a bit too into Goosebumps books (admittedly I had my fair share), or Star Wars extended universe novels, or thinking that Atlas Shrugged is a decent read.  While I like to think of myself as someone above the crowd and able to read free of obsessive completism or fanboysim, I have had moments of weakness – such was the case early in my college years, when I was struck by my Pinter phase.

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) is counted among the world’s greatest playwrights, an artist who created striking, sometimes terrifying existential stories of people trapped by language and human nature, created through innovative presentation and wise misanthropy.  His brand of dialogue and story was so distinctive that “Pinteresque” has entered the lexicon, and many of his plays are part of the modern theatrical canon.  I remember admiring quite a few plays of his, including The Dumb Waiter, Landscape, Silence, Betrayal, Mountain Language and Moonlight, and I snapped up a majority of his works in book form as quickly as I could.  This might have been a mistake, as upon the occasional reread his work can seem a bit phony and stiff for my tastes, though I suppose that was part of the strange atmosphere they often created.  I was also seriously disappointed with that remake of Sleuth he did in 2007, even before I had seen the original Sleuth.  As such I hadn’t thought about him for some years, until the other day I spotted a slim volume bearing his name at a local thrift store:

This little number is Mac, a eulogistic essay Pinter wrote in the late 1960’s in honor of the Shakespearean actor Andrew McMaster, published on its own in a limited edition by Pendragon Press.  McMaster (“Mac” to his friends) was one of the last of the old-style actor-managers, who ran a touring company and strictly worked in the theater.  You may remember this type of person as being immortalized in The Dresser, which chronicled an attempt to stage King Lear by Sir (Albert Finney) and company, with help from his dresser Norman (Tom Courtenay).  Pinter spent some months palling around with McMaster and his company on a tour of Ireland, and many of the details presented in The Dresser are present here, even a staging of King Lear wherein McMaster as Lear demands that the storm be louder.  Unlike Sir, however, McMaster was less a boorish, absent-minded despot and more a serious artist who, despite a healthy mixture of strengths and weaknesses, held great respect and loyalty among his colleagues and left his mark on the British theatrical world.

Touring with McMaster for many months, Pinter was able to observe dozens of performance, with McMaster triumphing, and sometimes simply passable-ing, in every major Shakespeare role from Lear to Othello, Shylock to Macbeth, and each role was given different standards of execution that could vary wildly.  Some roles he would laze through for town after town, only to leap into stunning action before a crowd of 50; others he handled like Fabergé eggs, objets d’art to be treated with the utmost care and respect.  The venues were mostly provincial dives with audiences who didn’t know Billy Shakes from Shinola, but however unenthusiastic the spectators were the company took each show as serious work – and whenever McMaster turned in subpar work he was the first to be disappointed during post-show drinks.

One would fear reading something like this that Pinter’s essay prose would veer into the sort of dialogue he wrote for his plays – thankfully there’s nothing surreal or stilted here.  This is excellent prose nonfiction, eschewing trying to be as clever as someone like Cyril Connolly in favor of good info and unobtrusive character.  Refreshingly for a eulogy, third-person reminiscing is broken up with small scenes, specific moments in Pinter’s interactions with McMaster that were so vividly interesting that they are presented almost as scripts, and beautifully capture McMaster’s tough-and-tender, no-nonsense personality.

This particular edition is one of three books with Pinter’s name to be published by Pendragon Press:

I’ve had a difficult time finding information on this press, largely because there have been many presses named Pendragon, so many that Wikipedia lists four unrelated firms, none of them the one I need to know about.  This London Pendragon Press may have been the private enterprise of Emanuel Wax, a playwright and contemporary of Pinter’s, as two of the books I found bore the above colophon stating they were published by him for Pendragon Press.  The second one was Pinter’s play Landscape, published solo in 1968 in a limited edition a year before being paired with Silence for its mainstream book appearance.  A third book, this time published by a Jonathan Wax in 1984, is Jimmy, a collection of anecdotes about the theatrical agent James Wax by Pinter and many others.  As Pinter had a close relationship with the press it’s no surprise that Mac ends with a facsimile repro of his signature; at first I got excited to see I had snagged a signed Pinter book for $2.99, though looking at photos by other booksellers confirms that it was the same in every copy, right down to the break in the flourish under the final “r”.  The book is handsomely typeset and presented overall, just as private presses should do, though they did goof in the subject bio at the end by somehow misspelling “Andrew”:

If you’re not a big Pinter fan there’s no reason to pick this up, especially not for the inflated prices I’ve seen online for it.  You can read Mac in the Collected Poems and Prose Pinter book from Grove Press, as well as their Complete Works, vol. 3.  However, the book is slim and charming enough that there may be just enough room for it in your heart and on your shelf, so if you see it for cheap snap it up and enjoy a quick, endearing read on a real-life Sir.

~PNK

The Mad Typist by Charles Lowenstein

If a book collector wishes to up the ante on their accumulation technique there are many methods, and one that requires a great deal of patience and research is the collecting of pamphlets.  Pamphlets are largely designed to be thrown away, and if not are very easily lost in shelves and archives or simply fall apart due to the lack of durable binding.  There’s also far less of a market for them considering how little content there is compared to a full book, and more often than not the content there is has appeared in a book at some point.  For example, in my last post I mentioned that Peter Quennell republished his poem “Inscription on a Fountainhead” as a pamphlet with illustrations, and I don’t have much interest in getting it because I already have the poem in a much nicer collected edition, and the illustrations are, well, kinda stupid.  But when pamphlets come cheap and easy it can be hard not to snatch them up, and it doesn’t get much cheaper or easier than a free box.

Found in a box of discarded, occasionally stepped-on books and CD’s outside a used record store in Boston, The Mad Typist is one of the most charmingly shoddy booklets I’ve come across.  Ostensibly a naff copy of a lost Twilight Zone episode, Charles Lowenstein’s story appears here photocopied from a typewritten manuscript combined with illustrations, illustrations with a certain je ne sais quoi.  See if you can suss out my assessment:

The Mad Typist documents an unsettling occurrence when a man, inspecting a local squirrel factory for the government, chances upon a patient who cannot stop typing.  The orderlies can’t make heads or tails out of the spewed pages; the hospital’s director considers the case hopeless but indulges this habit for the time being, perhaps because he is stuck to his desk:

As a matter of fact the manuscripts aren’t gibberish but are actually scientific papers, historically important ones dating back to ancient Greece and progressing through time to the present.  The patient has committed these documents to memory and is screaming them at the top of his keyboard, even though nobody around him can understand why he’s bothering.  It occurs to the visitor that the typist might even continue past scientific knowledge of the present and into the future, and after he unsuccessfully pleads the case for the typist’s release another patient just up and stabs the typist, just after he had started in on “The Effects of Infra Electro Magnetic Radiation on Time”, dated 2107:

The illustrations by Nicholas Lawrence, as you can see, are a total scream and would have made keeping the book worth it even if the story was total rubbish.  As it stands it’s a good rubbish, hitting that familiar and cheesy note we all need from this sort of trifle.  The typewritten text looks lousy, the writer plowing through with that graceless Courier font of rejected screenplays the world over, compounded by a photocopy job so dirty you’d think the book was meant to be a ransom note.  I suppose this is the best printing Milton, MA could offer in 1976, though the title page fonts are nice enough.  I also like that there’s evidence this was gifted rather than sold, albeit not to so close a friend:

If you need to read the whole thing I’ll shoot you a PDF, though you may want to wait for the movie adaptation, or the novelization of the movie, or the review of the novelization of the movie.  Or just pop by for a cup of coffee and read it then like a good friend.

Also, what happened to “Chucker”?

~PNK

A mere disquiet in the grass: the poetry of Peter Quennell

Like many people who collect books, I crept into it organically like a sinister fungus, allowing my tastes and interests to inform my pursuits rather than financial gain.  While some might think this approach has caused me to waste time and money, their judgment only works if they ignore what collecting is for in its purest sense, to create a mosaic of yourself through objects of varying degrees of history and sentimentality, a mirror you create piece by piece.  In that sense my collecting, across all the types of media I’ve collected over the years, has been naturally eclectic and has brought many a dud work into my life (though thankfully the duds are easy to shed) and certain weaknesses of mine have become sharply revealed.  My book weaknesses will be exposed in these posts, of course, and as I wanted to start this blog on a high note we’re beginning with the most attractive weakness I’ve developed – a love for obscure poetry of the first part of the 20th century, especially Modernist or semi-Modernist poetry put out by small presses in limited editions.

A lot of writers, whether seriously or as a lark, play at the game of poetry, but in a strictly capitalistic sense nobody “wins”.  Some look like winners, gaining fame and respect, and occasionally money, but the number of people known for poetry still living has dwindled down to a pinprick with each passing year and, with the death of Derek Walcott this past year, may very soon become a crushing Nought.  Nobody seems to notice this, though, and it may be that, while everybody knows what poetry is and many people read it, the time where it had any resonance in the lives of normal, adjusted, productive people has long since passed.  There’s a thesis or two to be written about why this is, one of which must discuss the intersection of widely-published poetry’s sublimation to mass-distributed pop music with Modernism’s influence restructuring of academic forms into a nebulous question mark, but I have neither the time or expertise to investigate it fully, and we all seem to like pop music anyways.  Poets and their publishers saw this trend emerging at the end of the 19th century and came to the realization that supply and demand would need to be adapted to in a very serious way in order for verse to keep growing – and it just so happened that around that same time there was a major social arts movement that was at the height of its powers and had decided to break into book publishing.  This was the Arts and Crafts movement, headed up, especially in the publishing end of things, by William Morris, England’s favorite socialist designer, and the example set by his Kelmscott Press, which published old and new works in the style of Medieval illuminated manuscripts, was a beacon that dozens of small presses looked towards for founding inspiration, most of which never dreamed about making laissez-faire enthusiasts proud.

Among these small presses was one that started modestly but would become a legend after a lucky change in ownership: the British Golden Cockerel Press, founded in 1920 and maintaining operations all the way to 1960, long after the initial boom of private presses had long since subsided.  Begun, as many small artistic ventures are, using funding from a wealthy and indulgent family, the press was originally four friends in a shed, headed by one Hal Taylor.  The press attracted the attention of a number of burgeoning writers of the day and set out to operate as a collective effort, with writers and craftspeople working together to make fine literary books by hand, carefully designing typefaces and layout, including original illustrations and decorations (usually woodcut) and printing on handmade paper.  This extended to the main font, a special concoction based on Renaissance-era French typefaces such as Garamond, and it has remained so attractive that it has inspired modern typeface enthusiasts to revive it.  It was a noble pursuit, aided by the quality of the writing, including the first books by a young A. E. Coppard, but was plagued by internal disarray and simple typographical errors.  One title noteworthy for its typos was Coppard’s first poetry book, Hips & Haws, which was apparently such a cock-up job that Coppard nearly fainted reviewing the published version, though you wouldn’t know it reviewing it years later, which you can.  Employee switches shifted the press from cooperative to a more conventional publishing format, though still with high quality of craft and word, and after a few years Hal Taylor was stricken with tuberculosis, leaving the press in shifting hands until it was put up for sale in 1924.  It was purchased by the engraver and sculptor Robert Gibbings and was transformed dramatically into an altogether much more impressive beast, the one that book collectors seek out with great fervor and causes them to spend hundreds of dollars on single titles.  Check this out:

This is the kind of stuff book collectors drool about into their pillows at night, and is certainly a lot flashier than GC’s modest beginnings, which featured plain bindings and far fewer illustrations.  That being said their formatting during the early years had that quiet austerity that book designers consider the golden standard and the designs did occasionally lean towards Modernist trends, such as the graduated spacing in the title pages for the stories in The Puppet Show, a story collection by the now-forgotten Martin Armstrong:

My affection for these early books also comes from the fact that they are the only ones that someone like me can afford to buy, albeit very slowly and by no means in a completist state of mind.  The first GC book I purchased, and the only one I felt I needed to have, was Masques & Poems, a slim collection of poems by Peter Quennell, a writer of whom I was totally unaware until chancing upon Masques, his first solo book.  Now largely forgotten, Quennell was best known in his lifetime as a biographer, including three volumes of autobiography and an acclaimed series of books on Lord Byron.  Before he took on a long career writing what his longtime friend Cyril Connolly would have likely considered “writing substitutes” he was something of a poetry prodigy, starting out in his mid-teens and getting the attention of Richard Hughes, author of the classic novel A High Wind in Jamaica and future Golden Cockerel author.  Hughes included part of what would become a large item in Masques & Poems in the anthology Public School Verse 1919-1920 of which he was co-editor, and introduced Quennell to important British literary figures of the day.  All this brought him to GC’s doors and let him publish his first book at the tender age of 17, and even the fact that he was at Oxford at the time doesn’t assuage the anxiety one feels when they realized that he accomplished such a great feat at the age when most of us were counting the minutes until our senior year of high school was finished.  And not only did the book feature his poems but it also included his own drawings, such as the banner illustration above and ones like this:

His poetry is extraordinarily evocative and polished for such a young writer, displaying a keen eye for sharp image and untroubled mandarin prose, such as in the first poem of the book:

His subject matter draws from sources familiar to the English poetic tradition that was long taught in schools, including natural phenomena and Greek mythology, but his technique and modern sense of distant tragedy keeps his work fresh even today.  He was able to break from traditional verse patterns without sacrificing concision and resonant line formation, a skill that usually takes years to master – a trait he shares with Rimbaud, another poet who distinguished himself in his teen years.  If pressed I’d class Quennell as a Symbolist (or Decadent or Aesthetic, depending on your nomenclatural tastes), and he might as well, too, considering that he wrote a book of essays on the Symbolists (including Rimbaud) in 1929.  Those giants of French poetry might have appreciated “The Lion of Nemea”, featuring the most arrestingly exotic imagery of the book:

His most “famous” poem is “Procne”, called famous by myself because it was the one that appeared the most in anthologies of the day, specifically the last Georgian Poetry volume (1920-1922) and the 1924 volume of Oxford Poetry, which he co-edited.  (Another extremely ephemeral note of its fame is that, so far, it’s the only poem of Quennell’s to be set to music, as an art song in the late 1970’s by the totally unknown Canadian composer Stephen Vise.  I wanted to make a copy of the song for this article but was spurned by the $35 lending fee asked for by the University of Toronto library, the institution that houses the only known copy of the song.)  Much like “Lion” it takes a fairly obscure figure in Greek mythology, Philomela’s sister Procne, and refracts the story through an observant and creative lens.  Procne’s tale is one of violent, Titus Andronicus-style revenge, and Quennell chooses to capture fugitive images of joy in an otherwise horrifying life.

Because of the free structure of the poems, patterns become more pronounced and special, and Quennell had a way with repeating important words and phrases only when most effective.  This can be seen in his poem “Starlings”, where the only notable repetitions contribute to a frightening atmosphere:

The first part of the book, however, consists of a pair of interlinked masques, “The Masque of the Three Beasts” and “The Masque of the Thin Horses”.  The masque is an allegorical pageant that arose during the Renaissance and became popular among English courts, and saw a brief revival in British literature in the early 20th century as part of a large-scale effort to return to decidedly British artistic roots.  While old masques were stately affairs, Quennell’s are both sardonic and surreal, depicting encounters between kings, knights and a trio of “beasts” on a strange, desolate landscape.  Far too short to practically stage, they feature bizarre dialogue and mysterious circumstances, arising from the imagination and receding just as unexplainably as they arrived.  Here’s a taste:

I’ve never seen anything quite like these in their effect, and as far as I can tell Quennell never wrote anything like them again.  A fragment from the “Masque of the Three Beasts” was the text chosen by Richard Hughes for the Public School Verse anthology, making it Quennell’s first published work – now there’s a kick in the pants for you.

Quennell wouldn’t publish poetry again until 1926, when a collection (including four poems from his first book) was published in a limited edition by Chatto & Windus under the plain title of Poems, and was reprinted in 1928 in another limited edition, this time more attractive, by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.  This latter edition is the one that I have and cost about a 4th of what I paid for Masques & poems despite being in better condition, looking much prettier and using nicer paper.  Here they are side-by-side for comparison:

Both books were produced in editions limited to 500 copies, though in the case of Masques there was a slightly later “cheaper edition” in paperback (though I of course sprung for the non-cheap edition).  The 1926/8 Poems runs only 33 pages, and in the forward Quennell explains that writing poetry was an occasional activity for him, done when the mood and inspiration struck him:

(I apologize if this seems a bit much, though this page shows off his crystalline, attractively self-deprecating prose style).  This strikes me as a bit odd considering that the poetry in Poems is more ambitious in its outlook, featuring multi-part poems with greater complexity than his Masques work, though sadly no masques.  Once again the subject matter focuses on Greek mythology and nature, and his powers of observation and verse skill remain as sharp as they were before, sustained in larger forms.  The longest may well be “Leviathan”, based on the sinking of Atlantis, as it is stretched across three substantial “chapters”, and it ends with one of my favorite codas to a disaster story:

There is also a four-part set of “Travel Poems”, likely written during just such an activity, as Quennell traveled widely like many of his British literary colleagues.  No matter his subject matter or initial inspiration the imagery is always vivid and conveyed with effortless precision and effect.  I especially appreciated small visuals, such as the last phrase of “Calligraphy”, among Quennell’s most metrically experimental poems:

The Cape and Smith edition has the added benefit of enchanting presentation, bound in heavy quarto-sized boards with rosebush cameos and printed in the finely-detailed Erasmus font on handmade Pannekoek “antique” paper, made by a Dutch manufacturer that dated back to the 17th century.  It wasn’t until I got this book that I really started thinking about how handmade paper could be much more pleasurable to work with than not – the Pannekoek paper is sturdy but perfectly bendable and quite soft, with a fine, creamy texture and appealing custard color.  It’s the kind of paper you wish every book could be made out of (including the composer Hector Berlioz, who used it for his manuscripts), and its makers were proud enough of their work that they stamped a few pages with their logo:

The book may have marked the last time he wrote poetry, though he did republish his poem “Inscription on a Fountainhead” as an illustrated pamphlet in 1929.  His focus had shifted towards fiction, though in that regard he only published one novel and one story collection, The Phoenix-Kind in 1931 and Sympathy and Other Stories in 1938, respectively, before devoting himself entirely to nonfiction.  I may review those two books in the future, though considering the impression Quennell’s poetry has left on me I’m not sure they can really stack up.  It’s a shame he didn’t work more seriously at verse because he was one of the more individual and endearing poets of his time, perhaps not as adventurous as his Modernist colleagues but always more than worth the readers’ time.  These editions are obviously rare and the poetry has never been reprinted as far as I can tell, so I’m not sure if it will have a place in the future of poetry appreciation, though Masques is definitely in the public domain in the U.S.A. and I’m sure one would discover that Poems is as well if they could throw the time and resources at finding that out.  The editions also illustrate why I find so much enjoyment from unearthing this era of poetry in original editions – each book is unique, using the purposefully limited audience to experiment with formatting and materials and create a special reading experience for special literature.  Quennell’s verse is special indeed, and worth reprinting in its entirety, which wouldn’t be too expensive considering how little of it there is.  These books are among the only books I’ve ever kept by my bedside after I’ve read them, as they have a haunting and inspiring quality and I’ve enjoyed returning to them again and again.  Once again, here’s a link to Masques & Poems so you too can see what my fuss is about, and what your fuss may be as well.

~PNK