'A Perpetual Repudiation of the Past'

To find the owner of a bookstore reading a book while manning the cash register may be the perfect litmus test for judging the quality of his stock. Saturday afternoon, John Dillman of Kaboom Books was reading a paperback of Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (1964) by Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett. I haven’t read it but the title alone gave us an excuse to talk about Louis MacNeice, Kristallnacht and Neville Chamberlain.

I went away with a small but precious haul – The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson and the 1946 hardcover edition of Henry James’ The American Scene, edited and with an introduction by W.H. Auden. I already have a paperback copy of the latter, published by Indiana University Press in 1968, with an introduction by Leon Edel, but the spine has cracked and one volume soon will be two. In the first chapter, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” James visits some of the Boston neighborhoods he knew decades earlier, where “the work of time loomed large.” His observations seem pertinent to much recent social pathology:

“What was taking place was a perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate, so far as the past was a positive rather than a negative quantity. There had been plenty in it, assuredly, of the negative, and that was but a shabbiness to disown or a deception to expose; yet there had been an old conscious commemorated life too, and it was this that had become the victim of supersession.”