'Unread Books and Lost Reputations'

On the free book cart at the university library I unearthed a midden left by an extinct culture: fifty-one copies of The American Scholar and four of The Yale Review. The former date from B.E. – Before Epstein – and make it clear how Joseph Epstein’s tenure as editor (1975-97) rejuvenated that tired journal. The earliest issue is from 1959; the latest, 1973. The latter all date from 1972-73 – my undergraduate years. My canvas book bag was already stuffed, so I asked a librarian for three of the plastic bags given to students when it’s raining. Then I borrowed a book cart and pushed the lot out to my car.

The collection is a bracing refutation of unthinking nostalgia. You have to sift to uncover the sparkling nuggets. Little in the journals is written with a confident sense of style. The literary worth of much published in The American Scholar during that era is compromised in one of two ways: 1.) The articles are drily academic and stuffy, “donnish” in the English sense. 2.) They are anachronistically topical, devoted to the long-forgotten “issues” of the day. Who cares about “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” circa 1970? How rare is writing that transcends its time?

The Spring 1970 issue of The American Scholar includes a qualified exception, a feature titled “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years.” The editors asked fifty-three writers and critics to identify books deserving of rescue. As is customary with such things, there’s plenty of showing off on display. Johan Huizinga appears more often than any other name. Auden’s reply is a model of gentlemanly concision: “Rhymes of a Pfc by Lincoln Kirsten (New Directions, 1964). The best volume of poems directly about World War II.” So too is Samuel Beckett’s:

“I haven’t had much time for reading in the past quarter of a century and my opinion on the subject, if I could find one, would be quite worthless. Forgive me and all success to your project.”

I like the idea of finding an opinion, as though it were a lost sock, rather than having one. The film critic Stanley Kauffmann selects Blood from the Sky (1961) by Piotr Rawicz. Two writers, Kenneth S. Lynn and Martin E. Marty, name Wright Morris for Man and Boy (1951) and The Home Place (1948), respectively. Peter Taylor nominates a wonderful novel, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934) by Caroline Gordon. I’ll spare you the choices of Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Sontag.

Immediately preceding the neglected books feature in The American Scholar is a brief essay, “Out of Print,” by Michael Holroyd, the biographer of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw. He writes that “occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history.” More important is a small niche in the life of a devoted, enterprising reader. Holroyd names some of the perennial candidates for resuscitation – William Gerhardie, Hugh Kingsmill, Patrick Hamilton. He writes:

“In the stock market of unread books and lost reputations, there is a perpetual turmoil of activity, fascinating for literary speculators to observe. Whose head will break the surface? Who will sink? Who swim? Since fashion, educational fashion, plays such a large part in success of this kind, individual quality is not enough. And where common sense is blocked, eccentricity must find a way.”

Ah, but individual quality is enough – for the individual reader. I don’t read and reread the fiction of Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Dawn Powell because they are fashionable. Rather, it is their oblivious, wayward “eccentricity” that keeps me coming back.