For my birthday last month my wife gave me Hart Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters, and I have nibbled at it daily, savoring his words and prolonging the pleasure. The Crane volume is the latest addition to the Library of America, which since 1982 has been publishing our literary inheritance in compact, attractive, definitive editions. Their Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Twain, Grant, Henry and William James, Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens and Raymond Chandler are the editions on my shelves, the ones I rely on.
Inevitably, the bottom scraping and pandering to non-literary interests has commenced. Projects like this, of course, must perpetuate themselves and justify their existence. That means cash, and cash means politics, so there are constituencies to coddle that have nothing to do with literary merit. In recent years we have seen the LoA canonize James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, H.P. Lovecraft, Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck, to name only the most offensively unnecessary authors in the LoA catalog. All of these writers, judging from the libraries and bookstores I patronize, are readily available in other editions, so the LoA can’t justify their inclusion as a form of literary reclamation. What these writers have in common is their appeal to people with little or no interest in literature, and little or no literary taste. Lovecraft, for instance, is unreadable, and his inclusion demeans others on the LoA shelf, such as Melville, Nabokov and Singer. Presumably, the LoA’s editors decided to enfranchise the adolescent boys who still read Lovecraft’s pulpy rubbish. The danger is that less sophisticated, more credulous readers might assume that any book wrapped in the LoA’s distinctive black covers carries the imprimatur of the Literature Police.
For induction into the LoA I nominate Sherwood Anderson, Marianne Moore, Edward Dahlberg, A.J. Liebling, William Maxwell, John Cheever, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, William Gaddis and Guy Davenport. Do I hear any other nominations? I know the LoA has published a Berryman Selected Poems as part of its American Poets Project, but it’s a skimpy offering and its value is reduced by the inclusion of A.R. Ammons, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emma Lazarus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg in the same series.
The LoA’s declared mission is “to help preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writing in durable and authoritative editions.” There’s no question they have fulfilled the “durable and authoritative” part, but they must have let Bowles & Co. squeak in using that slippery “most significant” clause.
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2 comments:
My thanks to AE for disencumbering me of the obligation to read Bowles (who I thought I had to read) and Lovecraft (who I am pretty sure I would never have read anyway). If they are no better than Steinbeck, then I can move on to other things.
I would like to take him on over Millay, though. Indeed the split of opinion over ESVM is a minor curiosity of American literary taste.
Having so ably skewered LA, I wonder what AE thinks of NYRB, i.e., New York Review of Books "forgotten classics."
I nominate Tom Robbins whose book Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates so nobly exalts, celebrates, defends, and embodies the kind of elitism AE embraces in his post and nominations.
We already have one living LOA author in Henry Roth. Shall we mere rabble--the common reading public--clamor so loud as to force LOA to "cave" to another?
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