'In Praise of Half-Forgotten Books'

Sometimes all it takes for me to pull a book off the shelf is a provocative or otherwise interesting title. While retrieving a collection of William H. Pritchard’s reviews in the university library I noticed a nearby slender volume titled In Praise of the Half-Forgotten and Other Ruminations. My first thought: what a fine epitaph could be made of that, and I too am one of nature’s ruminators. The author is George Brandon Saul (1901-86). The book was published by Bucknell University Press in 1976. I know little about Saul except that he taught English for many years at the University of Connecticut and often wrote about Yeats and other Irish writers. 

The book title attracts me because “half-forgotten” books attract me. Of course, most books today are on the way to being fully forgotten. A writer’s reputation, a nebulous thing at best, is often manufactured by marketers, publicists and malleable critics; not the true critics, the only ones who matter, serious readers. Saul says he hopes his books “may help plug a few holes in literary history.” His title essay consists of brief reviews – he calls them “critical brevities” – of six poets, only one of whom I’ve ever heard of – Dubose Hayward (author of the 1925 novel Porgy, the source of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess).

 

Saul devotes essays to the criticism of James Stephens, the poetry of A.E, Coppard, English metrics, the poems of Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, A.E. Housman, and Stevenson and Henley as lyricists. Many fine writers but none critically or academically fashionable, except perhaps Housman for extra-literary reasons. I’m especially pleased that Saul includes “Autumn Nights: The Prose of Alexander Smith.” If remembered at all, Smith (1830-67), a Scot, is remembered as a poet but he excels as an essayist. The book to find is Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863). Like his mentors Montaigne and Charles Lamb, Smith may be an egotist, yes, but a benign egotist, as contradictory as that sounds. His work starts with self but extends outward to absorb the bigger, more interesting world. Egotism is not the same as narcissism. Among Smith’s essays is “On the Writing of Essays,” with observations readily applicable to blogs:

 

“The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with.”

 

For further confirmation of Smith’s naturalness and literary sophistication as an essayist, read this from “A Shelf in My Bookcase” on the virtues of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “It is quite impossible to over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence.”

 

Saul tells about half the story when he describes Smith as “a lover of simplicity and quiet, of gentleness and village gossip, of books and meditation in still gardens.”