The Book of Lost Books Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction - “I’ll burn my books—ah, Mephistophilis” CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Doctor Faustus

  Anonymous

  Homer

  Hesiod

  The Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, the Priestly Author, and the Redactor

  Sappho

  K’ung Fu-tzu

  Aeschylus

  Sophocles

  Euripides

  Agathon

  Aristophanes

  Xenocles and Others

  Menander

  Callimachus

  The Caesars

  Gallus

  Ovid

  Longinus

  St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus)

  Origen

  Faltonia Betitia Proba

  Klidsa

  Fulgentius

  Widsith the Wide-Traveled

  The Venerable Bede

  Muhammad ibn Ishaq

  Ahmad ad-Daqiqi

  Dante Alighieri

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  François Villon

  John Skelton

  Camillo Querno

  Luis Vaz de Camões (Camoëns)

  Torquato Tasso

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

  Edmund Spenser

  William Shakespeare

  John Donne

  Ben Jonson

  John Milton

  Sir Thomas Urquhart

  Abraham Cowley

  Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

  Jean Racine

  Ihara Saikaku

  Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

  Alexander Pope

  Dr. Samuel Johnson

  Rev. Laurence Sterne

  Edward Gibbon

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Robert Fergusson

  James Hogg

  Sir Walter Scott

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Jane Austen

  George Gordon, Lord Byron

  Thomas Carlyle

  Heinrich Heine

  Joseph Smith Jr.

  Nikolai Gogol

  Charles Dickens

  Herman Melville

  Gustave Flaubert

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Sir Richard Burton

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Émile Zola

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Frank Norris

  Franz Kafka

  Ezra Loomis Pound

  Thomas Stearns Eliot

  Thomas Edward Lawrence

  Bruno Schulz

  Ernest Hemingway

  Dylan Marlais Thomas

  William Seward Burroughs

  Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV

  Sylvia Plath

  Georges Perec

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  This book is for Sam, who found me

  Hence, perpetually and essentially, texts run the risk of becoming definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?

  —JACQUES DERRIDA, “Plato’s Pharmacy”

  Introduction

  “I’ll burn my books—ah, Mephistophilis” CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Doctor Faustus

  MY MOTHER CLAIMS it started with the Mr. Men series of children’s books. In a well-rehearsed pantomime of parental exasperation, she recounts how, after a family relative had given me a copy of one of Roger Hargreaves’s stories, every holiday jaunt, weekend outing, and Saturday shopping trip became a single-minded trawl of bookshops until I had every single one of the series. Mr. Bump needed Mr. Nosey, Mr. Tickle was lonely without Mr. Chatterbox. After I had finished this first collection I swiftly became obsessed, I forget for what reason, with the Dr. Who novelizations; this was followed by “Fighting Fantasy” dice and decision books, and, as I approached my teens, Agatha Christie paperbacks.

  A pattern began to develop; a pattern that would turn obsessive. Having one or some of the titles within any given series was not sufficient; I seemed to be afflicted with a relentless monomania for all, a near-compulsive necessity for closure and completeness. I even kept a “Book of Lists,” to reassure myself that I really did know every episode of Dr. Who, with checks by the ones I had bought and annotations about the ones that had never been novelized. When all of Agatha Christie’s books were reissued with newly designed covers, the idea of having mismatched volumes struck me as unspeakably grotesque. I stalked the old stock, ferreted for the forgotten copies at the back of the shelves.

  It must have been with some trepidation, on my fourteenth Christmas, that my parents watched me unwrap a Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chancellor Press, 1982, printed in Czechoslovakia) and a selection of Wordsworth (by W. E. Williams, introduction by Jenni Calder, Penguin Poetry Library, 1985). I presume that they were hoping that Literature—with a capital L—was a large enough field in which my fixation might peter out.

  Instead, Literature drove my zeal to new heights. The itch became a palpable rash when I started studying Greek (initially as a shameless ruse to avoid sports). Having saved up months of weekend-job wages, and having starved myself rationing lunch money, I binged on Penguin Classics of Hellenic drama: two volumes of Aeschylus, two of Sophocles, three of Aristophanes, four of Euripides, and a solitary Menander. The first shock to my well-ordered system came as I peeled back the smart covers and began to browse through the introductions. I was under the impression that I had just bought all of Greek drama, yet the prefaces and commentaries doomfully tolled otherwise: Aeschylus, whose seven plays I was holding, had actually written eighty; there should have been thirty-three volumes of Sophocles, not a mere brace . . . and so on.

  The second, more grievous realization came when reading note 61 to Aristophanes’ play Thesmophoriazusae: “Agathon, one of the most celebrated tragedians of the day, was forty-one when this play was produced. None of his works has survived.” None? Not a chorus, not a speech, not a hemistich? It seemed unthinkable.

  This, I decided, at the age of fifteen, was a situation I should rectify. I started compiling a List of Lost Books. It quickly superseded my Book of Lists with its “Everyone in Star Wars That Wasn’t Made into a Figure,” “Dr. Who Episodes Lost by the BBC,” and even the list of books that I should read. This new list would be of the impossible and the unknowable, of books that I would never be able to find, let alone read.

  It soon became clear that the subject was not limited to the Greeks, who, after all, had managed to keep on existing through Roman arrogance, Christian lack of interest, and a certain caliph’s censorious view of libraries in general and the Alexandrian Library specifically.

  From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess. The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature.

  It is intrinsic to the nature of literature that it is written: even work initially preserved in the oral tradition only truly becomes literature when it is written down. All literature thus exists in a medium, be it wax, stone, clay, papyrus, paper, or even—as in the case of the Peruvian knot language, Khipu—rope. Since it has a material dimension, literature itself partakes of the vulnerability of its substance. Every element conspires against it: flame and flood, the desiccating air that corrupts, the loamy earth that decays. Paper is particularly defenseless: it can be shredded and ripped, stained and scrubbed away. Countless living things, from parasites and fungi to insects and rodents, can eat it: it even eats itself, burning in its own acids.

  The simplest form of loss is destruction. Though the Roman poet Horace proclaimed, “I have built a monument more durable than
bronze,” he expressed a hope about his work, not a certainty. The nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all of his early poetry, as he dedicated his life to the beauty of God. James Joyce petulantly flung Stephen Hero, the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, into the fire, but did not prevent his wife from saving what she could of it. Mikhail Bakhtin, exiled in Kazakhstan, used his work on Dostoyevsky as cigarette papers, after having smoked a copy of the Bible.

  Some writings are absent, presumed destroyed: Socrates, while in prison awaiting his execution, wrote versifications of Aesop’s Fables. None of these have survived, and we rely on Plato’s remembered and invented dialogues to catch even an echo of what Socrates himself might have written. Similarly, at some point, the only text of Aristotle’s second book of Poetics was lost, and even the first book is made up from students’ notes. A similar fate happened centuries later to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. When the publisher John Calder had to hastily relocate his offices in late 1962, many manuscripts—including The Sowing, the third part of Lars Lawrence’s trilogy, and Angus Heriot’s The Lives of the Librettists—were left behind in the old premises. The building, unpublished works and all, was demolished. If any undiscovered genius had sent his sole copy to Calder, undiscovered he would remain.

  There are other works that are lost in the sense of being misplaced. A suitcase containing Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine was stolen from his publisher’s car, and the version we have had to be reconstructed from what was left in Lowry’s wastebasket. Allen Ginsberg recollected hearing fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso reading in a lesbian bar in the Village, though you can search in vain through Corso’s published oeuvre to find a poem with the line he remembered: “The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour’s life.” How Ginsberg knew that Flesh was capitalized is a moot point.

  There are also those manuscripts that meet an untimely end, whose authors’ mortal existence is concluded before their work. The medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar wrote a haunting elegy for many of his dead fellow writers: of the twenty-two poets he lists, there are ten about whom we know nothing whatsoever. Virgil left instructions for The Aeneid to be torched, since he had not polished it to perfection. Sir Philip Sidney wrote the Arcadia once, but his own massive expansion of the work was abruptly terminated by a bullet on the battlefield at Zutphen. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Dolliver Romance, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Denis Duval are all partial classics. The SS put paid to the radical theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s disquisition on ethics. Robert Musil and Marcel Proust never quite perfected their similarly voluminous master-pieces; and though we have enough extant to make them “classics,” a doubt scratches around these incomplete, unfinished, permanently paused novels.

  The final category of lost books is the eternally embryonic works that the author planned and worked on, but never actually got around to the business of writing. Solon, the Athenian legislator, was too busy introducing income tax to turn the story of Atlantis into verse. The philosopher Boethius never managed to create his proof that Plato and Aristotle were in strict agreement. Sheridan told everyone that the sequel to The School for Scandal was going to be called Affectation, but did not bother writing it. Daudet’s The Pentameron and Victor Hugo’s La Quinquengrogne are both perpetually forthcoming. Lewis Grassic Gibbon was prevented from even beginning the novel he described in a letter as “McLorna McDoone,” and who knows whether or not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might not have planned to reveal the true story behind the Giant Rat of Sumatra, which Watson once alluded to while Holmes was engaged with more immediate cases? Would Thomas Mann’s Gaia have been the masterpiece that while it was unwritten he believed it could be? Would Nabokov’s never-written Speak, America, the follow-up to his volume of memoirs, Speak, Memory, have told us more about the composition of Lolita or his triumphs in butterfly collecting? Often these works are so ambitious their completion seems intrinsically impossible: Novalis’ Encyclopedia, covering all human knowledge, progressed little beyond his anxieties about whether the contents list would also serve as an index. Likewise, Leopardi’s Encyclopedia of Useless Information is incomplete: one wonders what he would have made of the Internet.

  One other category of lost books exists but, with an unreasonable optimism about the future, I have chosen not to discuss the illegible. Languages such as Linear A, Mayan, and the Easter Island Script have not been deciphered, and might therefore be considered to contain whole lost literatures: however, after being thought incomprehensible for millennia, the decryption of the Rosetta stone in the nineteenth century meant hieroglyphics could now, tentatively, be read. If this book is on the Quanta net in 5005, I would not wish my descendents to be troubled with having to make any deletions.

  Loss has symptoms and predilections. Comedy displays many of the high-risk features, as do erotica and autobiography. The loss of Philip Larkin’s diaries, combining all three of these genres, was almost inevitable. The censuring of the erotic also accounts for the loss of a book by the Abbasid court poet Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri (whether panegyric, satire, or handbook can never be known) entitled Masturbation. Over and above the content of the work, the multiplicity of theological and political regimes under which a piece of writing might find itself—its nurture, rather than nature, if you will—contribute to extinction.

  From Savonarola to the Ayatollah Khomeini, religions have expressed themselves through book-burning. Valentin Gentilis, who lived in Geneva, wrote a discursive piece on the idea that Calvin’s Trinitarian doctrine inadvertently posited a fourth member of the Godhead. He was imprisoned for eight years, recanted, and then was executed: his punishment (apart from the deprivation of life) was first to burn his own work. His sentence was considered light.

  The fact that Osip Mandelstam’s blisteringly satirical “Stalin Ode” survived at all is remarkable; many others of his papers, drafts, and scribbles were burned, flushed, and otherwise discarded. His compatriot Isaac Babel was not so lucky. When he was arrested by Stalin’s secret police on May 15, 1939, agents removed every single piece of paper from his flat.

  Certain authors, rather than certain works, become suspect. That there are not more entries on women writers, gay writers, and writers from outside Europe, and the English language, is partially my own fault, and partially the fault of those who systematically erased that work. Virginia Woolf famously tried to imagine Shakespeare’s sister, but the inexorable and unchangeable nature of the past frustrates any attempt at giving a name to those who have been deprived of even a ghostly lost existence. In their place, with a few exceptions, I will concentrate on the so-called Canon. The much-vaunted Western Canon, trumpeted abroad for its wealth, happiness, and strength, is not an Olympian torch or a Thoroughbred horse; it exists by chance, not necessity, a lucky crag protruding from an ocean of loss. That melancholy parade of disfigured busts, crazed ceramics, blistered portraits, and foxed photographs is here, in all its shaky, precarious glory. They are our conditional, might-have-been-otherwise, sheer damn lucky tradition. Those overwhelmed by Time’s corrosion are not so fortunate.

  Is becoming lost the worst that can happen to a book? A lost book is susceptible to a degree of wish fulfilment. The lost book, like the person you never dared ask to the dance, becomes infinitely more alluring simply because it can be perfect only in the imagination.

  We are, nowadays, almost incapable of believing in loss. As Project Gutenberg and databases like the Chadwyck-Healy continue to grow, and offer the idea of a perma-fixed cyberspace culture, it is important and humbling to recognize that there is no automatic afterlife for literature. Prizes and plaudits are awarded on a daily basis; yet the ultimate fate of those lucky recipients is no more secure than that of the great prize-winner Agathon. Even a repository like the British Library used to have old request slips with a box on the back, infrequently but occasionally checked, stating “Volume lost.” There is, equally, no guara
ntee that an intangible existence is also an unreachable state of being. If literature were a house, The Book of Lost Books would be Rachel Whiteread’s House, a poured-into vacancy that is both tomb and trace. The Book of Lost Books is an alternative history of literature, an epitaph and a wake, a hypothetical library and an elegy to what might have been.

  On the Absence of a Bibliography and Footnotes in This Work

  Zora Neale Hurston, the American folklorist and black activist, who left a novel entitled Herod the Great unfinished at her death, defined research as “formalized curiosity.” It is, I think, a liberating definition. There seems to me to be a terrible irony in trying to create a bibliography for The Book of Lost Books: the substance is, by its nature, not in any library or collection. I could, I suppose, display the chain of references that took me, for example, from Aeschylus’ Oresteia translated by Robert Fagles to Gilbert Murray’s Aeschylus to volume ten of the works of the theologian Athenaeus; but where would this chain end? Not, assuredly, in the actual lost book, but in the whisper of its disappearance. For a book like this, footnotes are a trail to an empty grave.

  Rather than marshal readers along the meanders and diversions that my own formalized curiosity led to, I would, however, prefer them to set out on their own adventure. There are obvious places to start: every moderately well-stocked public library should, at least, contain either the Columbia or Britannica encyclopedia, which offer an array of further routes to choose. I would also recommend Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, Edward Browne’s Literary History of Persia, Suchi Kato’s History of Japanese Literature, Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame, Rosier’s Encyclopedia, and . . . but already this is looking like a reading list.

  Most of the authors discussed in this book did leave behind extant works, and the reader can choose, for the most part, between numerous editions: Penguin Classics, the World’s Classics, Everyman, the Modern Library. Lost books is a practically infinite subject; and there are many—Acacius’ Life of Eusebius, Eusebius’ Life of Pamphilus, works by Anna Boškovic and Denis Fonvizin—that, through reasons of space, obscurity, or indolence, did not make it into this book. The curious reader will no doubt find many more, and may find many more interesting. He or she may even find a book hitherto thought lost: the Scottish poet John Man-son recently discovered, among various papers and ephemera in the National Library of Scotland, an almost complete text of the Modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s “lost” magnum opus, Mature Art.