From today's Dispatch on the NY Review of Books Classics series:
"The series grew out of a catalog I was editing of books in print," [Edwin] Frank said. "It was broken down into categories such as ‘Italian Literature,’ and I noticed there wasn’t a single book in print by Alberto Moravia.
"That gave me a sense that there was a hole (in publishing) that could be filled."
And fill it his series has, with two titles by Moravia (Boredom and Contempt) as well as with little-known books by under-appreciated writers such as J.R. Ackerley, Joyce Cary, Richard Hughes, Mavis Gallant and J.F. Powers.
Universities concentrate, understandably, on teaching canonical works, tested by time and deemed the greatest achievements in literature. But that sort of vetting can crush lighter, more delicate pieces.
"In college today you’ll read a lot of Virginia Woolf. Of course Virginia Woolf was a remarkable writer, but she was also a remarkable modernist writer, and that is how she’s taught, as a modernist," Frank said.
"There are a lot of books on our list that are modern, but not modernist, and for that reason they tend to get passed over. Richard Hughes’ "A High Wind in Jamaica" is electrifying in its own right. It could only be a 20th-century book, but it doesn’t fit into any of the categories."
Many of the books in the series have had, at one time or another, cult followings. Dog lovers, for instance, have long pointed to Ackerley’s "My Dog Tulip" as one of the very best books ever written on the relationship between man and canine.
Other books, such as Hughes’ "A High Wind in Jamaica", were vastly popular when published, but then almost entirely forgotten — for decades — until Frank or one of his army of suggesters unearthed it and made it a part of the series.
"The picking process is still headed by me," he said. "I’m a committee of one. But I solicit suggestions from our contributors and readers. Probably my biggest resource is the used-book store."
The used-book store is a place, Frank said, where decade-by-decade fashions in literature "overlap and rub shoulders."
*
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow
Not reckoning that all could melt and go. — To the Etruscan Poets, Richard Wilbur
--Bill Eichenberger
No comments:
Post a Comment